Biological Approaches to Spatial Representation { A Survey

In the past decade, a large number of robots have been built that explicitly implement biological navigation behaviours. We review these biomimetic approaches using a framework that allows for a common description of biological and technical navigation behaviour. The review shows that biomimetic systems make signi cant contributions to two elds of research: First, they provide a real world test of models of biological navigation behaviour; second, they make new navigation mechanisms available for technical applications, most notably in the eld of indoor robot navigation. While simpler insect navigation behaviours have been implemented quite successfully, the more complicated waynding capabilities of vertebrates still pose a challenge to current systems.