Rather than engineering robotic solutions from scratch, some of our most impressive advances have come from copying what nature has already come up with.

New research shows how we can extend that approach to robot ‘minds’, in this case by getting a robot to learn the best route out of a maze all by itself – even down to keeping a sort-of memory of particular turns.

A team of engineers coded a Lego robot to find its way through a hexagonal labyrinth: by default it turned right at every function, until it hit a point it had previously visited or came to a dead end, at which point it had to start again.