| 1. |
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- 2019
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)
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| 2. |
- Baird, Emily, et al.
(författare)
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A universal strategy for visually guided landing.
- 2013
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - : Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - 1091-6490 .- 0027-8424. ; 110:46, s. 18686-18691
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Landing is a challenging aspect of flight because, to land safely, speed must be decreased to a value close to zero at touchdown. The mechanisms by which animals achieve this remain unclear. When landing on horizontal surfaces, honey bees control their speed by holding constant the rate of front-to-back image motion (optic flow) generated by the surface as they reduce altitude. As inclination increases, however, this simple pattern of optic flow becomes increasingly complex. How do honey bees control speed when landing on surfaces that have different orientations? To answer this, we analyze the trajectories of honey bees landing on a vertical surface that produces various patterns of motion. We find that landing honey bees control their speed by holding the rate of expansion of the image constant. We then test and confirm this hypothesis rigorously by analyzing landings when the apparent rate of expansion generated by the surface is manipulated artificially. This strategy ensures that speed is reduced, gradually and automatically, as the surface is approached. We then develop a mathematical model of this strategy and show that it can effectively be used to guide smooth landings on surfaces of any orientation, including horizontal surfaces. This biological strategy for guiding landings does not require knowledge about either the distance to the surface or the speed at which it is approached. The simplicity and generality of this landing strategy suggests that it is likely to be exploited by other flying animals and makes it ideal for implementation in the guidance systems of flying robots.
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| 3. |
- Baird, Emily, et al.
(författare)
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The effect of optic flow cues on honeybee flight control in wind
- 2021
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences. - : The Royal Society. - 0962-8452 .- 1471-2954. ; 288:1943
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- To minimize the risk of colliding with the ground or other obstacles, flying animals need to control both their ground speed and ground height. This task is particularly challenging in wind, where head winds require an animal to increase its airspeed to maintain a constant ground speed and tail winds may generate negative airspeeds, rendering flight more difficult to control. In this study, we investigate how head and tail winds affect flight control in the honeybee Apis mellifera, which is known to rely on the pattern of visual motion generated across the eye-known as optic flow-to maintain constant ground speeds and heights. We find that, when provided with both longitudinal and transverse optic flow cues (in or perpendicular to the direction of flight, respectively), honeybees maintain a constant ground speed but fly lower in head winds and higher in tail winds, a response that is also observed when longitudinal optic flow cues are minimized. When the transverse component of optic flow is minimized, or when all optic flow cues are minimized, the effect of wind on ground height is abolished. We propose that the regular sidewards oscillations that the bees make as they fly may be used to extract information about the distance to the ground, independently of the longitudinal optic flow that they use for ground speed control. This computationally simple strategy could have potential uses in the development of lightweight and robust systems for guiding autonomous flying vehicles in natural environments.
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| 4. |
- Dacke, Marie, et al.
(författare)
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Evidence for counting in insects
- 2008
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Ingår i: Animal Cognition. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1435-9456 .- 1435-9448. ; 11:4, s. 683-689
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Here we investigate the counting ability in honeybees by training them to receive a food reward after they have passed a specific number of landmarks. The distance to the food reward is varied frequently and randomly, whilst keeping the number of intervening landmarks constant. Thus, the bees cannot identify the food reward in terms of its distance from the hive. We find that bees can count up to four objects, when they are encountered sequentially during flight. Furthermore, bees trained in this way are able count novel objects, which they have never previously encountered, thus demonstrating that they are capable of object-independent counting. A further experiment reveals that the counting ability that the bees display in our experiments is primarily sequential in nature. It appears that bees can navigate to food sources by maintaining a running count of prominent landmarks that are passed en route, provided this number does not exceed four.
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| 5. |
- Goyal, Pulkit, et al.
(författare)
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Visual guidance of honeybees approaching a vertical landing surface
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Experimental Biology. - 0022-0949 .- 1477-9145. ; 226:17
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Landing is a critical phase for flying animals, whereby many rely on visual cues to perform controlled touchdown. Foraging honeybees rely on regular landings on flowers to collect food crucial for colony survival and reproduction. Here, we explored how honeybees utilize optical expansion cues to regulate approach flight speed when landing on vertical surfaces. Three sensory-motor control models have been proposed for landings of natural flyers. Landing honeybees maintain a constant optical expansion rate set-point, resulting in a gradual decrease in approach velocity and gentile touchdown. Bumblebees exhibit a similar strategy, but they regularly switch to a new constant optical expansion rate set-point. In contrast, landing birds fly at a constant time to contact to achieve faster landings. Here, we re-examined the landing strategy of honeybees by fitting the three models to individual approach flights of honeybees landing on platforms with varying optical expansion cues. Surprisingly, the landing model identified in bumblebees proved to be the most suitable for these honeybees. This reveals that honeybees adjust their optical expansion rate in a stepwise manner. Bees flying at low optical expansion rates tend to increase their set-point stepwise, while those flying at high optical expansion rates tend to decrease it stepwise. This modular landing control system enables honeybees to land rapidly and reliably under a wide range of initial flight conditions and visual landing platform patterns. The remarkable similarity between the landing strategies of honeybees and bumblebees suggests that this may also be prevalent among other flying insects. Furthermore, these findings hold promising potential for bioinspired guidance systems in flying robots.
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| 6. |
- Malm, Henrik, et al.
(författare)
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Biologically inspired enhancement of dim light video
- 2012
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Sensing: From Biology to Engineering. - Vienna : Springer Vienna. - 9783211997499 - 9783211997482 ; , s. 71-85
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this chapter a technology for the enhancement of video data obtained at low light levels is presented. The method was inspired by the way in which nocturnal animals adaptively sum intensities, spatially and temporally, to improve vision at night. Due to the low photon count under these conditions the visual input is dark and unreliable, which leads to noisy low contrast images. The noise becomes very apparent when we try to enhance the contrast and, by this, amplify the intensities in the darkest regions of the images. By constructing spatio-temporal smoothing kernels that automatically adapt to the three dimensional intensity structure at every point, the noise can be considerably reduced, with fine spatial detail being preserved and enhanced without added motion blur. For color image data, the chromaticity is restored and demosaicing of raw RGB input data can be performed simultaneously with the noise reduction. The method is a very generally applicable one, contains only few user-defined parameters and has been developed for efficient parallel computation using a graphics processing unit (GPU). The technique has been applied to image sequences with various degrees of darkness and noise levels. Results from some of these tests, and comparisons to related work, are presented here.
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| 7. |
- Moore, Richard JD, et al.
(författare)
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FicTrac: A visual method for tracking spherical motion and generating fictive animal paths
- 2014
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Ingår i: Journal of Neuroscience Methods. - : Elsevier BV. - 1872-678X .- 0165-0270. ; 225, s. 106-119
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Studying how animals interface with a virtual reality can further our understanding of how attention, learning and memory, sensory processing, and navigation are handled by the brain, at both the neurophysiological and behavioural levels. To this end, we have developed a novel vision-based tracking system, FicTrac (Fictive path Tracking software), for estimating the path an animal makes whilst rotating an air-supported sphere using only input from a standard camera and computer vision techniques. We have found that the accuracy and robustness of FicTrac outperforms a low-cost implementation of a standard optical mouse-based approach for generating fictive paths. FicTrac is simple to implement for a wide variety of experimental configurations and, importantly, is fast to execute, enabling real-time sensory feedback for behaving animals. We have used FicTrac to record the behaviour of tethered honeybees, Apis mellifera, whilst presenting visual stimuli in both open-loop and closed-loop experimental paradigms. We found that FicTrac could accurately register the fictive paths of bees as they walked towards bright green vertical bars presented on an LED arena. Using FicTrac, we have demonstrated closed-loop visual fixation in both the honeybee and the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, establishing the flexibility of this system. FicTrac provides the experimenter with a simple yet adaptable system that can be combined with electrophysiological recording techniques to study the neural mechanisms of behaviour in a variety of organisms, including walking vertebrates
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| 8. |
- Paulk, Angelique C, et al.
(författare)
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Selective attention in the honeybee optic lobes precedes behavioral choices
- 2014
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - : Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - 1091-6490 .- 0027-8424. ; 111:13, s. 5006-5011
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Attention allows animals to respond selectively to competing stimuli, enabling some stimuli to evoke a behavioral response while others are ignored. How the brain does this remains mysterious, although it is increasingly evident that even animals with the smallest brains display this capacity. For example, insects respond selectively to salient visual stimuli, but it is unknown where such selectivity occurs in the insect brain, or whether neural correlates of attention might predict the visual choices made by an insect. Here, we investigate neural correlates of visual attention in behaving honeybees (Apis mellifera). Using a closed-loop paradigm that allows tethered, walking bees to actively control visual objects in a virtual reality arena, we show that behavioral fixation increases neuronal responses to flickering, frequency-tagged stimuli. Attention-like effects were reduced in the optic lobes during replay of the same visual sequences, when bees were not able to control the visual displays. When bees were presented with competing frequency-tagged visual stimuli, selectivity in the medulla (an optic ganglion) preceded behavioral selection of a stimulus, suggesting that modulation of early visual processing centers precedes eventual behavioral choices made by these insects.
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| 9. |
- Taylor, Gavin, et al.
(författare)
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Insects modify their behaviour depending on the feedback sensor used when walking on a trackball in virtual-reality
- 2015
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Ingår i: Journal of Experimental Biology. - : The Company of Biologists. - 1477-9145 .- 0022-0949. ; 218, s. 3118-3127
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- When using virtual-reality paradigms to study animal behaviour, careful attention must be paid to how the animal's actions are detected. This is particularly relevant in closed-loop experiments where the animal interacts with a stimulus. Many different sensor types have been used to measure aspects of behaviour, and although some sensors may be more accurate than others, few studies have examined whether, and how, such differences affect an animal's behaviour in a closed-loop experiment. To investigate this issue, we conducted experiments with tethered honeybees walking on an air-supported trackball and fixating a visual object in closed-loop. Bees walked faster and along straighter paths when the motion of the trackball was measured in the classical fashion - using optical motion sensors repurposed from computer mice - than when measured more accurately using a computer vision algorithm called 'FicTrac'. When computer mouse sensors were used to measure bees' behaviour, the bees modified their behaviour and achieved improved control of the stimulus. This behavioural change appears to be a response to a systematic error in the computer mouse sensor that reduces the sensitivity of this sensor system under certain conditions. Although the large perceived inertia and mass of the trackball relative to the honeybee is a limitation of tethered walking paradigms, observing differences depending on the sensor system used to measure bee behaviour was not expected. This study suggests that bees are capable of fine-tuning their motor control to improve the outcome of the task they are performing. Further, our findings show that caution is required when designing virtual-reality experiments, as animals can potentially respond to the artificial scenario in unexpected and unintended ways.
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| 10. |
- Taylor, Gavin, et al.
(författare)
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Vision and air flow combine to streamline flying honeybees
- 2013
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Ingår i: Scientific Reports. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2045-2322. ; 3:Article Number: 2614
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Insects face the challenge of integrating multi-sensory information to control their flight. Here we study a 'streamlining' response in honeybees, whereby honeybees raise their abdomen to reduce drag. We find that this response, which was recently reported to be mediated by optic flow, is also strongly modulated by the presence of air flow simulating a head wind. The Johnston's organs in the antennae were found to play a role in the measurement of the air speed that is used to control the streamlining response. The response to a combination of visual motion and wind is complex and can be explained by a model that incorporates a non-linear combination of the two stimuli. The use of visual and mechanosensory cues increases the strength of the streamlining response when the stimuli are present concurrently. We propose this multisensory integration will make the response more robust to transient disturbances in either modality.
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