Robot Learning/Using Learning Navigational Skills From Lobsters

Nature has endowed birds, ants,bees, fish, spiders and other animals with a remarkable sense of direction. This allows them to locate their positions from a built in global positioning system(GPS) that's senses the earth's magnetic field with great accuracy, and allows them to travel them in desired directions without getting lost. Lobsters, even when taken 37 kilometers from where they were caught, under the conditions that they would not have orientation clues, can still find their ways back, because of this uncanny ability to sense their position. This stems from their being able to sense local anomalies in the earth;s magnetic field.
This remarkable attribute is now being developed in robots by scientists at the University of North Carolina, USA.

It is known that buildings have distinctive magnetic topography, which can be readily mapped using a magnetometer. Such field variations were measured and then stored in the memory of robot. Using such magnetic maps, the robot was able to find its way about although it did not have a vision system, thereby effectively mimicking the behavior of Lobsters. There is still much to be learned from the birds and the bees.