Holistic visual encoding of ant-like routes: Navigation without waypoints

It is known that ants learn long visually guided routes through complex terrain. However, the mechanisms by which visual information is first learned and then used to control a route direction are not well understood. In this article, we propose a parsimonious mechanism for visually guided route following. We investigate whether a simple approach, involving scanning the environment and moving in the direction that appears most familiar, can provide a model of visually guided route learning in ants. We implement view familiarity as a means of navigation by training a classifier to determine whether a given view is part of a route and using the confidence in this classification as a proxy for familiarity. Through the coupling of movement and viewing direction, a familiar view specifies a familiar direction of viewing and thus a familiar movement to make. We show the feasibility of our approach as a model of ant-like route acquisition by learning a series of nontrivial routes through an indoor environment using a large gantry robot equipped with a panoramic camera.