Abstract
Over the last half century, work with flies, bees, and moths have revealed a number of visual guidance strategies for controlling different aspects of flight. Some algorithms, such as the use of pattern velocity in forward flight, are employed by all insects studied so far, and are used to control multiple flight tasks such as regulation of speed, measurement of distance, and positioning through narrow passages. Although much attention has been devoted to long-range navigation and homing in birds, until recently, very little was known about how birds control flight in a moment-to-moment fashion. A bird that flies rapidly through dense foliage to land on a branch—as birds often do—engages in a veritable three-dimensional slalom, in which it has to continually dodge branches and leaves, and find, and possibly even plan a collision-free path to the goal in real time. Each mode of flight from take-off to goal could potentially involve a different visual guidance algorithm. Here, we briefly review strategies for visual guidance of flight in insects, synthesize recent work from short-range visual guidance in birds, and offer a general comparison between the two groups of organisms.
Highlights
Reviewed by: Ivo Gerard Ros, California Institute of Technology, United States Andrew Biewener, Harvard University, United States
This research has revealed that insects rely heavily on optic flow—the pattern and speed of the motion of the image of the environment in their eyes that they experience during flight—to orchestrate a number of important behaviors
The low speed, on the other hand, appears to be a speed that these birds adopt when they fly in relatively dark or cluttered environments. While it is not yet clear whether the low speed represents another local minimum of energy consumption, we find that our Budgerigars consistently fly at a low speed of ∼5 m/s when they fly in environments that could be perceived by them to be unsafe
Summary
Honeybees (Srinivasan et al, 1996) and bumblebees (Dyhr and Higgins, 2010) navigate safely through narrow corridors by flying close to the corridor’s midline. This “centering” response has been investigated experimentally in flying honeybees (Srinivasan et al, 1996), bumblebees (Dyhr and Higgins, 2010), and subsequently even in walking humans (Duchon and Warren, 2002) by moving the visual pattern on one wall or the other at various speeds, in the flight direction or against it These manipulations reveal that safe steering through narrow corridors is achieved by balancing the flow signals (the image pattern velocities) that are experienced by the two eyes. The responses of these birds during flight in tunnels that present asymmetrically moving visual patterns is yet to be examined
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