Animals use a combination of egocentric navigation driven by
the internal integration of environmental cues, interspersed
with geocentric course correction and reorientation. These
processes are accompanied by uncertainty in sensory
acquisition of information, planning and execution. Inspired
by observations of dung beetle navigational strategies that
show switching between geocentric and egocentric strategies,
we consider the question of optimal reorientation rates for the
navigation of an agent moving 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 punctuated by reorientation events leading
to a biased random walks at long time scales. This allows us
to identify optimal alternation schemes and characterize their
robustness in the context of noisy sensory acquisition as well
as performance errors linked with variations in environmental
conditions and agent–environment interactions.