A bee in the corridor: centring or wall-following ?

A bee in a corridor:

centring or wall-following ?

J. Serres, F. Ruffier, G.P. Masson and N. Franceschini

Biorobotics Dpt., Movement and Perception Inst., CNRS/Univ. of the Mediterranean, 163, avenue Luminy, 13288 Marseille Cedex 09 FRANCE e-mail: [email protected]

• Experimental procedure • Image processing and time-lapse photography

• Experimental results: to centre or not to centre ?

Digital CMOS camera: Prosilica

EC1280 High resolution: 1280x1024 pixels

20 fps, sampling period T

=50ms Camera viewfield : 1.5 m x 0.95 m

Future and Emerging Technologies

Stacked Images

Manual thresholding Manual cleaning

Automatic reconstruction

E

E

E

20px

128 px

0.47m ± 0.11m 0.65m ± 0.08m 0.24m ± 0.08m 0.44m ± 0.11m 0.24m ± 0.10m

R

E

R

R

R

R

E

E

E

E

• Conclusion

Bees do not systematically adopt a centring response in contrast with previous observations (Kirchner and Srinivasan, 1989) The ‘optic flow balance’ hypothesis (Srinivasan et al., 1991) does not account for the wall-following behaviour observed here The bee’s sideways motion is well accounted for by a lateral optic flow regulator (Serres et al., Proc. IEEE/RAS Biorob 2006)

T14-8B

(Ruffier et al., Göttingen, T14-7B, 2007).

FOV

R

R

0.95 0 0.95 0

Camera viewfield

0.95 0 0.95 0 0.95 0

x(m) 3

2.25

0.75

0

Left wall absent

y(m) R

Flight parameters analysis

n

= 30

= 27

= 42

= 49

= 57