Many creatures with small brains and simple nervous systems - such as insects - are astonishingly good at coping with the world around them. A fly, for example, can deftly evade a swat, manoeuvre perfectly well in a cluttered world, and execute a flawless landing on the rim of a teacup. Do such creatures use clever short-cuts to vision and navigation, and if so, can these tricks be exploited to create new kinds of robots?

These questions are explored in this book, which contains articles by experimental biologists as well as computer scientists, in this newly emerging multidisciplinary field. This is a fresh approach to an area of research that has traditionally been dominated by engineering methods, and the book is written in a style in which technical jargon is kept to a minimum.