You Spin me Round: Damselfly Reactions to Visual Motion

Jennifer Lindy Talley, David Michael Richards, Jessica Thompson

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	Insects are agile, robust, autonomous fliers. We cannot engineer systems with the same properties using current design rules, therefore we propose that studying insect flight, sensors, and processing will give us new principles of design to apply to engineered systems. A beginning step to understanding the connection between flight, sensor capability, neural processing, and muscular control is investigating how visual motion is employed for navigation tasks (Srinivasan 1999) and to separate the contrasting demands of stabilizing the visual world and tracking a target (Collett T., H-0 Nalbach and H. Wagner 1993). To date, we have recorded the natural flight and laboratory flight of wild caught damselflies, and developed auto-tracking algorithms to measure their flight kinematics. We have recorded stabilization responses of tethered damselflies to global motion simulating a roll maneuver. In the future, we will use a comparative approach to understand general principles of insect flight across diverse species, specifically comparing relatively unknown damselflies with well-studied insects (Hengstenberg 1991, Schilstra 1998). From there we can develop hypotheses and test the processing of optical information that allows target tracking in an agile flying insect (Franz 2004). This knowledge will be applied to the development of new technologies for robotic alternate navigation strategies (Lewis 1997).
Published in:	Proceedings of the ION 2017 Pacific PNT Meeting May 1 - 4, 2017 Marriott Waikiki Beach Resort & Spa Honolulu, Hawaii
Pages:	908 - 916
Cite this article:	Talley, Jennifer Lindy, Richards, David Michael, Thompson, Jessica, "You Spin me Round: Damselfly Reactions to Visual Motion," Proceedings of the ION 2017 Pacific PNT Meeting, Honolulu, Hawaii, May 2017, pp. 908-916. https://doi.org/10.33012/2017.15017
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