ANU Bee guru wins Prime Minister's award for Science

OK, I admit a little bias here because it involves one of my PhD supervisors, but I think it's worth a mention. Professor Mandyam Srinivasan, a world expert on honeybees and pioneer of a field of robotics that takes its inspiration from insect vision, was awarded the Prime Minister's award for science on Monday night during a ceremony at Parliament House.

Professor Srinivasan's work has contributed significantly to our knowledge of how insects solve complex navigation problems with such apparent ease, despite possessing a brain the size of a pin head. He has concentrated mostly on the vision system of the honeybee, which is known to be highly specialised to the tasks it performs. Perhaps the most significant lessons learnt from this work are that you can achieve a lot with a small amount of computing power, which is why robotics researchers are so keen on insects. Srinivasan was one of the first to implement insect-inspired navigation strategies on robots equipped with cameras. This is now a well established field of robotics research, and has helped bring robotics research forward many years, after a long time spent getting seemingly no where.

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