[fho]

The crazy thing is how good the ants are at this. Especially considering their brain size.

With robots it works ok, but over time small errors accumulate. After travelling for a while the home error will be off.

In contrast desert ants are able to do this trick after travelling for hundreds of meters.

[withinboredom]

I’m sure the ants have some kind of error correction, and even if it is a one-off robot, you can apply a personal error correction, but it will be specific to that robot. There is no “general” amount of error because every motor/encoder/circuit will provide different levels of error.

[Retr0id]

You can't just "error correct" accumulated random errors. The only way to be accurate is to never lose precision in the first place (which makes the ants especially impressive).