FLINAVS

Investigating Flying Insect Navigation Strategies: Computer Modeling and Robots

Supervisor(s): Martin Egelhaaf, Ralf Möller
Project Member(s): Wolfgang Stürzl

Term: 2008-02 till 2012-10
Research Area: A B D

Abstract

Insects with their tiny brains have capabilities that still outperform technical systems in many aspects. The FLINAVS project aims at a detailed understanding of the sensing, processing, and navigation capabilities of flying insects, which are likely to be of interest for mobile technical systems, in particular small aerial vehicles with limited computing power and pay-load.

Research Questions and Methods

Many activities of daily living require orientation and task-oriented locomotion in complex three-dimensional environments. Insects, in particular bees, demonstrate an extraordinary ability to use visual memories for learning the spatial location of their nest and food sites.

Outcomes

In a modeling study accompanying spatial navigation experiments, we could show that bees are likely to use “dynamic snapshots” based on optic-flow amplitudes. This is supported by the fact that bees move their head in a saccadic fashion during flight – very fast yaw rotations are followed by intervals in which head orientation is kept almost perfectly constant. Such active separation of rotation and translation simplifies the perception of the 3D structure, as only translatory flow-fields depend on the distances to objects.

In order to develop and test models of the navigation and sensing strategies of animals, it is of great importance to know their sensory input as accurately as possible. We recently established a detailed model of the spatial resolution of a bee’s eye describing viewing directions and acceptance angles of ommatidia over the full field of view of both eyes. We also developed a panoramic imaging system with 280° field of view covering almost the whole visual field of a honeybee. Because of its light-weight and compact design it is well suited for small flying robots.