Author: sponberg

Locomotor systems need the ability to maintain performance during a wide range of mechanical demands. Large fluctuations in body mass due to growth, injury, or feeding prove to be an important example of such demands. Foraging Manduca sexta can increase their body mass by approximately 50% in a short period of hovering feeding while still […]

Using information theory, we’ve seen that the flight motor program of moths such as Manduca sexta is temporally precise to a millisecond scale. But where does this temporal precision come from, given it can potentially take tens of milliseconds for any signal from the brain to reach a flight muscle? In this study we’ve developed […]

Wingbeat frequency in flying insects spans several orders of magnitude; Even just in bombycoid moths, wingbeat frequency can vary from 5 Hz all the way up to 80 Hz or even more. All of these moth species have to accomplish these very different frequencies of locomotion using highly conserved flight musculature and neural constraints, so we wanted […]

There are two regimes for actuating flapping wings known as synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous flapping is where each wing beat corresponds to a muscle contraction caused by a neural signal resulting in the wing beat frequency matching the neural excitation frequency. In contrast, the asynchronous regime’s wing beat frequency is decoupled from the neural activation […]

Tracking and stabilization involves control around a fixed point. Depending on the method of control, this may or may not require memory in the form of a reference-point. While insects perform a wide range of memory-based behaviors, the fast formation and forgetting of reference points for control, has not been described before. We observed kinematics […]

Centralization which measures the coupling between neuromechanical modules that mediate responses to perturbations, has been determined to be an important parameter in locomotion for both biologists and roboticists. This metric can help capture how the various subsystems within an organism are interacting to produce an observed behaviour such as navigating across complex terrain. Our work […]

The neck connective in insects connects the brain to the thoracic motor control centers. This is a bottleneck in information-flow, through which all movement-relevant information from the brain must pass through. In the context of flower-tracking behavior, we ask whether the behaviorally observed features of multisensory control may be inferred from descending information in the […]