How honey bees use visual landmarks during goal-directed navigation: Wayfinding strategies as sequential decision-making processes

The impressive wayfinding abilities and unique communication system of foraging honey bees has made them an important model organism for the study of navigation for over seventy years. In this time, researchers have identified and quantified many of the navigational strategies these animals use to discover and exploit remote food sources in their environment. Computer scientists interested in designing intelligent mobile robots often look to natural systems like the honey bee for inspiration when developing the sensory systems and learning algorithms of their artificial agents. In this dissertation I examine several navigational strategies of honeybees and discuss how these behaviors might deal with two of the more difficult, overarching problems encountered by engineers attempting to build effective mobile robots: (1) how the agent determines what perceptual information provided by the environment is reliable for decision-making and (2) how the agent uses this information to guide its path through large, continuous real world environments. Chapter 1 begins by briefly reviewing the components of the sequential decision making framework. Chapter 2 experimentally examines how honeybees deal with the problem of perceptual aliasing. The results suggest that honey bees do not use visual memory as a primary strategy for resolving perceptual ambiguity. Chapter 3 identifies and investigates the spontaneous attraction honey bees have to visual landmarks they encounter en-route to a goal. These experiments suggest that this attraction is based on the visual size of the en-route landmark. I discuss how honey bees may use this behavior to aid the selection of useful perceptual information as well as segment a route into a smaller more manageable series of decision points. Chapter 4 is also concerned with the how honey bees use en-route visual landmarks to divide their environment into discrete and manageable number of decision points. Chapter 5 looks closely at the snapshot model of visual navigation which can be regarded as a mechanism for simplifying the task of generating flight control actions based on visual landmarks in large, complex environments. These experiments suggest that the use of visual beacons is the primary navigation strategy of honey bees while snapshot navigation is probably limited to only a small area very near the final goal.