Download or read book The Integration of Visual and Haltere Feedback in Drosophila Flight Control written by Alana Dawn Sherman and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Role of Wing Mechanosensory Feedback in Insect Flight Control written by Bradley H. Dickerson and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flying insects rapidly stabilize after perturbations using multiple sensory modalities (e.g., vision mechanoreception, olfaction) for active control. Mechanoreceptors' direct coupling of sensory structure to the environment, as opposed to the series of chemical cascades typical of photoreceptors, makes them critical components of locomotor control. For example, both dipteran (flies) and strepsipteran (twisted wing flies) insects possess pendular organs known as halteres that allow these animals to detect gyroscopic forces and correct for perturbations to the flight path. Yet, aside from the literature on halteres and recent work on the antennae of the hawkmoth Manduca sexta, it is unclear how other flying insects use mechanosensory information to control body dynamics. In Chapter 1, I review the role of sensory input in insect flight control, particularly mechanosensory information. Evolutionarily derived from the wings, halteres are essential to flight, providing information that allows flies to make rapid adjustments to their wing and body kinematics. During rotational maneuvers or instabilities during flight, halteres experience an inertial force that is orthogonal to the plane of oscillation, known as the Coriolis force. By definition, insect wings experience Coriolis forces during rotations. Further, the mechanosensory structures found on the halteres, campaniform sensilla, are also present on wings, suggesting that the wings can encode information about flight dynamics. In Chapter 2 (Dickerson et al., 2014), I test whether the wings can provide sensory information that helps informs the animal of its body dynamics. I use targeted manipulations of the wings to test for the presence of a reflex mediated by the embedded campaniform sensilla. I attach small rare-earth magnets to each wing and placed tethered moths within an electromagnet, thereby simulating an inertial stimulus around the animals' pitch axis. This stimulus elicits the same abdominal flexion reflex these animals exhibit in response to visual or whole-body pitch stimuli of the same frequency and amplitude. These results demonstrate that the wings can provide information about body dynamics during locomotion, a role previously thought to be the sole domain of the halteres. In Chapter 3 (Eberle, Dickerson et al., 2015), I use computational and robotic models of a flapping, flexible wing subject to rotation to address whether the Coriolis force can be experimentally observed using only changes in the wing's structural dynamics. I find that body rotation induces torsion that is the direct consequence of forces, including the Coriolis force, acting on the wings. I also find that this torsion changes the spatiotemporal pattern of strain across the wing. The emergent patterns of strain point to a mechanism by which flying insects could detect their angular velocity during perturbations or maneuvers via the structural dynamics of their wings. In Chapter 4, I extend the method developed to stimulate the wings in tethered flight to test how wing mechanosensory information interacts with the visual system. I subject moths to a moving sinusoidal grating in both dim and near-total darkness conditions, testing moths' abdominal flexion response during visual stimulation alone and during simultaneous stimulation of the wings and visual system. I find no significant differences between the two groups at either light level, suggesting that moths will track a high contrast visual object, even in extremely dim conditions. My findings also support the wings' role as context-dependent sensory structures.

Download or read book Induced Haltere Movements Reveal Multisensory Integration Schema in Drosophila written by Michael James Rauscher and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many animal taxa possess inertial sensory systems that aid in postural control via networks of stabilizing equilibrium reflexes. Flying insects typically make use of their multifunctional antennae and sensory feedback from their wings to fulfill this role, but in the true flies (order Diptera), the hindwings have evolved into specialized organs called halteres that are dedicated to this function. Like wings, the small aerodynamically-inert halteres beat up and down during flight under the control of a suite of power and steering muscles, maintaining a precise phase relationship with the forewings. Gyroscopic forces that arise from body rotations are detected by the primary sensory afferents of halteres-superficial mechanosensory neurons called campaniform sensilla. These specialized cells project to wing- and head-steering motoneurons, either directly or via interneurons, and mediate fast reflexes that are essential for flies to remain in the air. Descending projections from the visual system target the same motoneurons, and direct their own set of optomotor reflexes, raising the question of how information from these two sensory systems are combined by their shared nervous system elements to produce motor output. Using tethered flight behavioral experiments, we provided fictive gyroscopic information to the halteres using a novel electromagnetic stimulation method. The resultant haltere-evoked wing amplitude responses were found to sum linearly with those evoked by concurrently-provided visual information, whereas head movement responses combined information from the two sense modalities in a nonlinear fashion. Sensory coding for haltere-mediated head and wing reflexes is dependent upon haltere-wing phase synchrony and the accompanying baseline "metronomic" input from haltere campaniform sensilla. Bilateral haltere ablation renders flies incapable of precisely modulating the amplitude of their wing steering outputs and impairs head and wing optomotor responses. We observed similar (but less pronounced) deficits for flies with one haltere ablated, immobilized, or driven asynchronously from the wings. These flies were still capable of adjusting the gain of their head optomotor responses, but at a lower response level than untreated animals. Additionally, we found that haltere-wing asynchrony reliably evoked haltere grooming behavior. Concurrent visual input was found to suppress grooming, implying higher order integration of the two senses.

Download or read book The Mechanics and Control of Active Vision in Fly Flight written by Benjamin Cellini and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals are capable of performing remarkable feats of agility, even when navigating through complex and often uncertain environments. From the sky to the depths of the ocean, we observe organisms with evolutionary adaptations so well-suited to their surroundings that even the most advanced human-engineered systems, i.e. robots, cannot yet hope to match their capabilities. But the sensory, neural, and biomechanical systems that underlie the robustness of animal behavior remain poorly understood. In flying insects, for example, the precise sensorimotor processes that allow insects to achieve stable flight remain elusive. Here I seek to understand the mechanisms govern insect flight, with a specific focus on revealing how flying insects simultaneously control head and body movements to maintain stable gaze. As a model organism, I chose Drosophila melanogaster--the common fruit fly--due to its robust and repeatable flight behavior and the wide array of established experimental methods. A prerequisite to achieve agile locomotion in visually active animals is to maintain stable and level gaze, thus my findings have broad implications throughout the animal kingdom and for the design of similarly agile robotic systems. In order to analyze fly flight, I applied a control theoretic framework that models the brain as the controller and the body mechanics and environmental dynamics as the plant in a feedback control system. This approach allowed me to describe fly behavior with a top-down approach, but with the advantage of also permitting the description of feedback loops and lower-level components of flies' sensorimotor systems, thus characterizing potential neural and biomechanical mechanisms that enable robust flight. I placed flies in a virtual reality flight arena and perturbed their gaze stabilization system with carefully designed visual and mechanical stimuli. By simulating the effects of head-mediated gaze stabilization on visual sensing, I demonstrated that head movements map visual inputs onto the sensitivity optimum of the motion vision pathway and enhance flight performance via active sensing. By combining experimental and mathematical methods, I showed that body movements are tuned to the velocity of visual motion whereas head movements are tuned to its acceleration. I discovered that this behavior emerges from proportional-derivative (PD) control, but unlike classical engineering control systems, flies relay the proportional and derivative signals in parallel to two distinct motor outputs (head and body). This complementary control of the head and body enabled broadband gaze stabilization, while head or body movements alone are not sufficient for flies to robustly stabilize gaze. This strategy likely evolved due to the differences in mechanical energy between moving a smaller motor (head) and moving a larger motor (body). Animals with more variation in body mechanics, such a heavier or longer body, would face the most evolutionary pressure to evolve a mobile head/eyes to conserve energy. I argue that animals as diverse as flies, mice, and humans, as well as bio-inspired robots can benefit energetically by having a high ratio between head, body and eye inertias. In fly flight, smooth movements of the head, wings, and body are punctuated by rapid, ballistic flight turns called saccades. This combination of smooth movements and saccades is best modeled as a hybrid (switching) system. I discovered that flies performed head and wing saccades in the direction opposite of visual motion, analogous to optokinetic nystagmus in primates. I discovered that flies leverage the neck's natural elasticity to perform rapid head 'reset' saccades, wherein the head would reset its position during each saccade. Head reset saccades enabled flies to quasi-continuously stabilize gaze between saccades, although the head-neck biomechanics are non-continuous due to the anatomical limits of the neck joint. I propose a hybrid control architecture for active vision systems with limits in sensor range of motion. Executing agile locomotion requires animals to integrate sensory feedback, often from multiple modalities. For example, human gaze is controlled by multiple feedback loops that integrate visual and vestibular information. Complicating their analysis, biological feedback loops are nested and dynamically coupled. I developed a control theoretic framework to unravel outer-loop visual sensory feedback and inner-loop mechanosensory feedback in the control of fly head movements. I discovered that visual feedback changes the tuning of head movements across visual motion frequencies, and mechanosensory feedback reduces the overall gain via active damping. Altogether, my findings clarify the role of nested feedback loops in flies and uncover mechanisms that reconcile differences in locomotion kinematics between flies operating in open-loop (body-fixed) and closed-loop (body-free). My framework is generalizable to biological and robotic systems relying on complex feedback control for guiding locomotion.

Download or read book AIAA Journal written by American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Insect Flight written by J. W. S. Pringle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-03 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Steady as She Goes written by Sawyer B. Fuller and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Achieving agile autonomous flight by an insect-sized micro aerial vehicle (MAV) will require improved technology that is radically smaller, lighter, and more power-efficient. One animal that has solved the problem is the fly, a virtuoso among insect flyers whose nervous system can perform sophisticated aerial maneuvers under severe computational constraints. This thesis is concerned with understanding and emulating the dynamics of the fly's feedback control system. Because vision is noisy and information rich, processing time may a problem for a fast-moving MAV or fly. By tracking the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in free flight in gusts of wind, I found that they incorporate feedback from wind-sensing antennae in a fast feedback loop that dampens the forward-flight dynamics. The slower dynamics are easier to control for long-delay visual feedback, making the fly more robust to the limitations of its visual system. Using the fly as inspiration, I designed a minimal, visual autocorrelation based controller that used a small array of visual sensors to stabilize a fan-actuated hovercraft robot in a narrow corridor. Using a model for correlators developed for the robot, I showed that a uniform array of visual correlators was sufficient to explain the free-flight velocity regulation behavior of flies, rather than a different model. In addition to illustrating the benefits of concurrent scientific analysis and engineering synthesis, the results give new insight into how to control small biological and man-made flying vehicles using limited, noisy sensors.

Download or read book Journal of Experimental Biology written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Methods in Insect Sensory Neuroscience written by Thomas A. Christensen and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2004-12-20 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insects are among the most diverse and adaptable organisms on Earth. They have long been our chief competitors for food and are responsible for spreading devastating afflictions such as malaria and encephalitis. The insects' ability to thrive is due in large part to their well-developed sensory systems, which present a host of novel physiological,

Download or read book The New Visual Neurosciences written by John S. Werner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-10-25 with total page 1693 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive review of contemporary research in the vision sciences, reflecting the rapid advances of recent years. Visual science is the model system for neuroscience, its findings relevant to all other areas. This essential reference to contemporary visual neuroscience covers the extraordinary range of the field today, from molecules and cell assemblies to systems and therapies. It provides a state-of-the art companion to the earlier book The Visual Neurosciences (MIT Press, 2003). This volume covers the dramatic advances made in the last decade, offering new topics, new authors, and new chapters. The New Visual Neurosciences assembles groundbreaking research, written by international authorities. Many of the 112 chapters treat seminal topics not included in the earlier book. These new topics include retinal feature detection; cortical connectomics; new approaches to mid-level vision and spatiotemporal perception; the latest understanding of how multimodal integration contributes to visual perception; new theoretical work on the role of neural oscillations in information processing; and new molecular and genetic techniques for understanding visual system development. An entirely new section covers invertebrate vision, reflecting the importance of this research in understanding fundamental principles of visual processing. Another new section treats translational visual neuroscience, covering recent progress in novel treatment modalities for optic nerve disorders, macular degeneration, and retinal cell replacement. The New Visual Neurosciences is an indispensable reference for students, teachers, researchers, clinicians, and anyone interested in contemporary neuroscience. Associate Editors Marie Burns, Joy Geng, Mark Goldman, James Handa, Andrew Ishida, George R. Mangun, Kimberley McAllister, Bruno Olshausen, Gregg Recanzone, Mandyam Srinivasan, W.Martin Usrey, Michael Webster, David Whitney Sections Retinal Mechanisms and Processes Organization of Visual Pathways Subcortical Processing Processing in Primary Visual Cortex Brightness and Color Pattern, Surface, and Shape Objects and Scenes Time, Motion, and Depth Eye Movements Cortical Mechanisms of Attention, Cognition, and Multimodal Integration Invertebrate Vision Theoretical Perspectives Molecular and Developmental Processes Translational Visual Neuroscience

Download or read book The Journal of Experimental Biology written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Real time Processing of Physiological Signals for Feedback Control written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extensive studies about neural mechanisms involved in insect flight control have been carried out. Adaptive control of locomotion requires integration of salient sensory cues with ongoing motor activity. During flight, inputs received by an organism through sensory organs are processed by the central nervous system (CNS) and the integrated output thus obtained plays a significant role in controlling the wing phase shifts and flight muscle depressor asymmetries associated with adaptive flight maneuvers. The resulting maneuvers, in turn, bring a change in the insects sensory environment, thereby closing the feedback loop. Research on insect flight has been carried out using immobile preparations (tethered) and mobile preparations (free flight untethered). There are pros and cons associated with the tethered and the untethered approach. The tethered approach, however, provides an easier way to study the CNS and its role in motor control of flight. Insects such as locusts and moths exhibit pertinent wing phase shifts and asymmetries in depressor muscles. For locusts constant wing phase shifts and m97 (forewing first basalar depressor muscle) depressor asymmetries have been observed during adaptive flight maneuvers making this a useful system for creation of behaviorally appropriate visual feedback. A method that utilizes asymmetrical timing of bilateral depressor muscles, the forewing first basalars (m97), of the locust to close a visual feedback loop in a computer-generated flight simulator is presented here. The method converts the time difference between left and right m97s to analog voltage values. Analog voltage values can be acquired using an open-loop experimental protocol (visual motion controlled by the experimenter), or can be used to control closed-loop experiments (muscle activity controls the visual stimuli) experiments. We recorded electromyographic (EMG) activity from right and left m97 muscles. On testing this circuit with real animals, we were able to d.

Download or read book Bioinspired Structures and Design written by Wole Soboyejo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master simple to advanced biomaterials and structures with this essential text. Featuring topics ranging from bionanoengineered materials to bio-inspired structures for spacecraft and bio-inspired robots, and covering issues such as motility, sensing, control and morphology, this highly illustrated text walks the reader through key scientific and practical engineering principles, discussing properties, applications and design. Presenting case studies for the design of materials and structures at the nano, micro, meso and macro-scales, and written by some of the leading experts on the subject, this is the ideal introduction to this emerging field for students in engineering and science as well as researchers.

Download or read book Bioinspired Actuators and Sensors written by Minoru Taya and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-13 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From experts in engineering and biology, this is the first book to integrate sensor and actuator technology with bioinspired design.

Download or read book An Introduction to the Study of Insects written by Donald Joyce Borror and published by Brooks Cole. This book was released on 1989 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text uses a taxonomic approach to introduce students to the science of entomology. Extensive use of identification keys acquaints students with all the families of insects in the United States and Canada and provides means for students to identify 95% or more of the insects found occurring in North America.

Download or read book The Computation of Linear Speed for Visual Flight Control in Drosophila Melanogaster written by Nicola Rohrseitz and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Bioinspired Structures and Design written by Wole Soboyejo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human cortical bone as a structural material : Hierarchical design and biological degradation / Robert Ritchie and Elizabeth A. Zimmermann -- Bio-inspiration from nacre / Nima Rahbar and Sina Askarinejad -- Bio-inspiration from bamboo / Ting Tan and Wole Soboyejo.