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Saccadic flight strategy facilitates collision avoidance: closed-loop performance of a cyberfly

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An Erratum to this article was published on 01 January 2012

Abstract

Behavioural and electrophysiological experiments suggest that blowflies employ an active saccadic strategy of flight and gaze control to separate the rotational from the translational optic flow components. As a consequence, this allows motion sensitive neurons to encode during translatory intersaccadic phases of locomotion information about the spatial layout of the environment. So far, it has not been clear whether and how a motor controller could decode the responses of these neurons to prevent a blowfly from colliding with obstacles. Here we propose a simple model of the blowfly visual course control system, named cyberfly, and investigate its performance and limitations. The sensory input module of the cyberfly emulates a pair of output neurons subserving the two eyes of the blowfly visual motion pathway. We analyse two sensory-motor interfaces (SMI). An SMI coupling the differential signal of the sensory neurons proportionally to the yaw rotation fails to avoid obstacles. A more plausible SMI is based on a saccadic controller. Even with sideward drift after saccades as is characteristic of real blowflies, the cyberfly is able to successfully avoid collisions with obstacles. The relative distance information contained in the optic flow during translatory movements between saccades is provided to the SMI by the responses of the visual output neurons. An obvious limitation of this simple mechanism is its strong dependence on the textural properties of the environment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Neurobiologie, Fakultät für Biologie, Universität Bielefeld, Postfach 10 01 31, 33501, Bielefeld, Germany

    Jens Peter Lindemann, Holger Weiss & Martin Egelhaaf

  2. AG Technische Informatik, Technische Fakultät, Universität Bielefeld, Postfach 10 01 31, 33501, Bielefeld, Germany

    Ralf Möller

Authors
  1. Jens Peter Lindemann
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  2. Holger Weiss
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  3. Ralf Möller
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  4. Martin Egelhaaf
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Correspondence to Jens Peter Lindemann.

Additional information

An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00422-012-0480-z.

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Lindemann, J.P., Weiss, H., Möller, R. et al. Saccadic flight strategy facilitates collision avoidance: closed-loop performance of a cyberfly. Biol Cybern 98, 213–227 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-007-0205-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-007-0205-x

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