With a brain the size of a pinhead, insects perform fantastic navigational feats. They avoid obstacles and move through small openings. How do they do this, with their limited brain power? Understanding the inner workings of an insect's brain can help us in our search towards energy-efficient computing, physicist demonstrates with her most recent result: a robot that acts like an insect. It's not easy to make use of the images that come in through your eyes, when deciding what your feet or wings should do. A key aspect here is the apparent motion of things as you move.

Insects use this information to infer how far away things are. Moving in curves makes the problem too complex for insects. To keep things manageable for their limited brainpower, they adjust their behaviour: they fly in a straight line, make a turn, then make another straight line. Much of Robotics is not concerned with efficiency. We humans tend to learn new tasks as we grow up and within Robotics, this is reflected in the current trend of machine learning. But insects are able to fly immediately from birth. An efficient way of doing that is hardwired in their brains.

In the future, they hopes to incorporate this specific insect behaviour in a chip as well. They comments: Instead of using a general-purpose computer with all its possibilities, you can build specific hardware; a tiny chip that does the job, keeping things much smaller and energy-efficient. Its mission is to develop materials-centred systems paradigms for cognitive computing based on modelling and learning at all levels: from materials that can learn to devices, circuits, and algorithms.