PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

With their miniature brains many insect groups are able to control highly aerobatic flight maneuvers and to solve spatial vision tasks, such as avoiding collisions with stationary obstacles as well as moving objects, landing on environmental structures, pursuing rapidly moving animals, or localizing a previously learnt inconspicuous goal on the basis of environmental cues. With regard to solving such tasks these insects outperform man-made autonomous flying systems, especially if computational costs and energy efficiency are taken as benchmarks. To accomplish their extraordinary performance several insect groups have been shown to actively shape the dynamics of the image flow on their eyes (“optic flow”) by the characteristic way they move when solving behavioral tasks. The neural processing of spatial information is greatly facilitated, for instance, by segregating the rotational from the translational optic flow component by way of a saccadic flight and gaze strategy. Flying insects acquire at least part of their strength as autonomous systems through active interactions with their environment, which lead to adaptive behavior in surroundings of a wide range of complexity. Model simulations and robotic implementations show that the smart biological mechanisms of motion computation and visually-guided flight control might be helpful to find technical solutions.