Hawkmoths such as Manduca sexta use proboscis mechanosensation as well as vision to track moving flowers while hover-feeding. In crepuscular moths, this poses a challenge since vision depends heavily on background luminance. If mechanosensory motor-response does not compensate, the same multisensory control can reduce flight performance. Using a two-part robotic flower to provide conflicting sensory […]
Continue reading Multisensory Integration is Luminance-Dependent
Animal locomotion poses many challenges to an animal’s sensorimotor processing, especially for goal-directed tasks in dynamic and uncertain environments. To understand these challenges, some neural network models can predict firing rates or other continuous representations of neural parameters or can classify sensory stimuli and motor responses. These models are integrated with traditional motor control models […]
The function of a visual system is to condense and transform patterns of light into a form that is meaningful to the rest of the brain and that can also be propagated to enable movement. Interestingly, how a moving visual scene is processed by the nervous system can look differently depending upon whether the animal […]
Continue reading How an ecologically-relevant odor affects visual motion processing
Plants and their pollinators must interact with changing airflow while simultaneously interacting as individual organisms. For flying pollinators, this includes flight through gusts and performing complex aerial maneuvers. Recent studies have begun to explore how these animals alter behavior in response to unsteady air, but we do not know if these conditions represent the local […]
Continue reading Natural flower wakes present aerodynamic challenges to pollinators
Animals such as cockroaches must coordinate the movements of multiple legs, which are coupled components of a complex hybrid-dynamical system, in order to stably run. Coordination could be achieved through a decentralized control architecture, where a motor command for a particular muscle is only informative of the variation of the local states of the limb, […]
Continue reading Centralization of Locomotor Control in Roaches & Robots
Hawkmoths, like Manduca sexta, hover and track moving flowers during natural foraging in low light environments. Neural recordings from the visual part of the moth’s brain have suggested that as light levels drop, the moth changes its sensitivity to light by integrating light for a longer period of time. Such a strategy raises the possibility […]
Continue reading Moths slow their brains to track flowers in low light
In an earlier research project with Dr. Jean-Michel Mongeau (now professor at PSU) we looked at the how cockroaches use their antennae as to feel surface in front of them and navigate in low light. Our approach in that project was to find the simplest control law the cockroaches could be using to maneuver by […]
Continue reading How antennae encode mechanical stimuli for tactile navigation
Locomotion is an inherently closed-loop process. What that means is that when we move it changes how we perceive the world — turning to your left is like the world around you rotating to the right. As a result, what we see (or sense) is the difference between how an object in our world is […]
Continue reading Control theoretic approaches to experiment and analysis of locomotion
Animals must sense their environment in order to navigate. American cockroaches (Periplaneta americana L.) in the natural world often face navigation challenges in cluttered, low-light environments. To supplement their vision, they use their antenna as tactile probes. They can track surfaces with their long antennae by letting the antenna bend against the surface and rapidly […]
Continue reading Bio-inspiration from how cockroaches navigate by touch
