TITLE:
Flying in Complex Environments: Can Insects Bind Multiple Sensory Perceptions and What Could Be the Lessons for Machine Vision?
AUTHORS:
Adrian G. Dyer, Sridhar Ravi, Jair E. Garcia
KEYWORDS:
Wind, Decision-Making, UAV, Brain, Perception, Color
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.7 No.5,
May
20,
2014
ABSTRACT: The possibility of having
flying machines in complex natural environments presents many exciting
possibilities, but also technical challenges. Insects often rely on visual cues
for flight and decision making, and recent work suggests that the perception of
wind force through tactile sensory inputs also provides important information
for flight control. However, the extent to which these respective cues might
potentially be bound together in the brain to enable accurate decisions remains
untested. Here we discuss recent evidence that the brain of insects possesses
mechanisms that may allow for the binding of complex multisensory information,
and we propose an experiment that could dissect whether insects like bees may
have such a capacity. We additionally discuss areas of the bee brain that might
facilitate decision making in order to provide a road map forward for future
work on understanding the mechanisms of flying in complex natural environments.