  Animals use a combination of egocentric navigation driven by the internal
integration of environmental cues, interspersed with geocentric course
correction and reorientation, often with uncertainty in sensory acquisition of
information, planning and execution. Inspired directly by observations of dung
beetle navigational strategies that show switching between geocentric and
egocentric strategies, we consider the question of optimal strategies for the
navigation of an agent along a preferred direction in the presence of multiple
sources of noise. We address this using a model that takes the form of a
correlated random walk at short time scales that is interspersed with
reorientation events that yields a biased random walks at long time scales. We
identify optimal alternation schemes and characterize their robustness in the
context of noisy sensory acquisition, and performance errors linked with
variations in environmental conditions and agent-environment interactions.
