Frontier stage

How to build a mind: Exploring insect-inspired AI for autonomous robots

In person
  • Date
    8 July 2025
    Timeframe
    14:20 - 14:40 CEST
    Duration
    20 minutes
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    Contemporary AI-based approaches such as transformers promise a step change for robotic autonomy. However, their hardware, data, training, and inference resource costs are all very substantial, and risk placing an additional burden on our already strained environment. Furthermore, their robustness and adaptability also remains to be confirmed. In contrast, the brain is tremendously data, energy, and resource efficient, yet provides highly robust and flexible general autonomy. In this talk I will review how the study of some of the smallest brains on the planet, the insects’, can teach us about the path to more efficient and robust robot autonomy, and how the resulting new class of AI is already making its way into the market.