Reverse engineering the insect brain

Until now, most efforts to create machines able to operate autonomously in the world have drawn on so-called deep learning techniques: a vastly expensive, computationally intensive suite of approaches that effectively attempt to replicate aspects of the human brain.

But UK technology startup Opteran is taking a different route, tapping into 600 million years of evolution to unravel and mimic the highly efficient navigational and decision-making abilities of insects.

Spun out from the University of Sheffield in 2020, Opteran - named after the Hymenoptera order of insects, which includes wasps, bees and ants - has now developed a commercially available product: the Opteran Mind - which it claims could help usher in a new era of higher performance autonomy at a fraction of the cost of existing approaches.

If you really want to see state of the art autonomy, don’t go to California…..look at a garden

Now employing 45 people, the company is growing rapidly, and last month announced a major partnership that will see its technology embedded in advanced warehouse robots developed by German autonomous picking and transportation robot manufacturer Safelog.