Abstract
Effective visuomotor coordination is a necessary requirement for the survival of many terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial animal species. We studied the kinematics of aerial pursuit in the blowfly Lucilia sericata using an actuated dummy as target for freely flying males. We found that the flies perform target tracking in the horizontal plane and target interception in the vertical plane. Our behavioural data suggest that the flies’ trajectory changes are a controlled combination of target heading angle and of the rate of change of the bearing angle. We implemented control laws in kinematic models and found that the contributions of proportional navigation strategy are negligible. We concluded that the difference between horizontal and vertical control relates to the difference in target heading angle the fly keeps constant: 0° in azimuth and 23° in elevation. Our work suggests that male Lucilia control both horizontal and vertical steerings by employing proportional controllers to the error angles. In horizontal plane, this controller operates at time delays as small as 10 ms, the fastest steering response observed in any flying animal, so far.
Highlights
Effective visuomotor coordination is a necessary requirement for the survival of many terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial animal species
The fastest trajectory adjustments in the range of 20 ms observed so far were reported for male dipteran flies when pursuing a female conspecific on the w ing[5]
Based on our experimental data we argue that the study of the distribution of θE, θA and θP gives important information but it will be necessary to perform a thorough temporal analysis of the trajectories to derive a robust control system
Summary
Effective visuomotor coordination is a necessary requirement for the survival of many terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial animal species. Taking advantage to the emergence of high-speed videography in the 1970s, Land and Collett carried out the first experiments to study aerial tracking on the housefly Fannia sp.[14] Based on their free flight data, they developed a kinematic model formally described as a proportional derivative, PD, controller with proportional and derivative gains (kp and kd, respectively), including a time delay ( t ). This was followed by studies on other species such as hoverfly15, housefly[16] and blowfly[17].
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