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From Visual Guidance in Flying Insects to Autonomous Aerial Vehicles

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Flying Insects and Robots

Abstract

Investigation of the principles of visually guided flight in insects is offering novel, computationally elegant solutions to challenges in machine vision and robot navigation. Insects perform remarkably well at seeing and perceiving the world and navigating effectively in it, despite possessing a brain that weighs less than a milligram and carries fewer than 0.01% as many neurons as ours does. Although most insects lack stereovision, they use a number of ingenious strategies for perceiving their world in three dimensions and navigating successfully in it. Over the past 20 years, research in our laboratory and elsewhere is revealing that flying insects rely primarily on cues derived from image motion (“optic flow”) to distinguish objects from backgrounds, to negotiate narrow gaps, to regulate flight speed, to compensate for headwinds and crosswinds, to estimate distance flown and to orchestrate smooth landings. Here we summarize some of these findings and describe a vision system currently being designed to facilitate automated terrain following and landing.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported partly by the US Army Research Office MURI ARMY-W911NF041076, Technical Monitor Dr Tom Doligalski, US ONR Award N00014-04-1-0334, an ARC Centre of Excellence Grant CE0561903 and a Queensland Smart State Premier’s Fellowship to MVS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Queensland Brain Institute and ARC Centre of Excellence in Vision Science, University of Queensland, 4072, St. Lucia, QLD, Australia

    Mandyam V. Srinivasan, Saul Thurrowgood & Dean Soccol

Authors
  1. Mandyam V. Srinivasan
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  2. Saul Thurrowgood
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  3. Dean Soccol
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mandyam V. Srinivasan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, 1015, Switzerland

    Dario Floreano

  2. Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, 1015, Switzerland

    Jean-Christophe Zufferey

  3. Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, 4072, Australia

    Mandyam V. Srinivasan

  4. Dept. Zoology, University Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EJ, United Kingdom

    Charlie Ellington

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Srinivasan, M.V., Thurrowgood, S., Soccol, D. (2009). From Visual Guidance in Flying Insects to Autonomous Aerial Vehicles. In: Floreano, D., Zufferey, JC., Srinivasan, M., Ellington, C. (eds) Flying Insects and Robots. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89393-6_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89393-6_2

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-89392-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-89393-6

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