Visual stimulation of saccades in magnetically tethered<i>Drosophila</i>

Bender, John A.; Dickinson, Michael H.

doi:10.1242/jeb.02369

Cited by 141 publications

(161 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…For example, horizontal edges generate vertical motion, whereas vertical edges generate horizontal motion and both cues trigger saccades equally well. 6 The extent to which different directional motion cues contribute to the control of flight speed and visual depth in flies is unknown. Here, we manipulated the orientation of motion cues, and measured the impact on these behavioral variables.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual Edge Orientation Shapes Free-Flight Behavior in Drosophila

Frye

Dickinson²

2007

Fly

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual Edge Orientation Shapes Free-Flight Behavior in Drosophila

Frye

Dickinson²

2007

Fly

Self Cite

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“…This important effect is, of course, entirely removed in studies that rigidly tether insects (12). Even in experimental preparations that loosely confine the motion of insects (23,24), turning kinematics are different from those observed in free-flight studies (10,15,25). These discrepancies indicate that restrictive preparations interfere with flight behavior, and the results of such studies must be interpreted in light of this influence.…”

mentioning

confidence: 95%

Discovering the flight autostabilizer of fruit flies by inducing aerial stumbles

Ristroph

Bergou

Ristroph³

et al. 2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

191

225

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Just as the Wright brothers implemented controls to achieve stable airplane flight, flying insects have evolved behavioral strategies that ensure recovery from flight disturbances. Pioneering studies performed on tethered and dissected insects demonstrate that the sensory, neurological, and musculoskeletal systems play important roles in flight control. Such studies, however, cannot produce an integrative model of insect flight stability because they do not incorporate the interaction of these systems with free-flight aerodynamics. We directly investigate control and stability through the application of torque impulses to freely flying fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) and measurement of their behavioral response. High-speed video and a new motion tracking method capture the aerial "stumble," and we discover that flies respond to gentle disturbances by accurately returning to their original orientation. These insects take advantage of a stabilizing aerodynamic influence and active torque generation to recover their heading to within 2°in <60 ms. To explain this recovery behavior, we form a feedback control model that includes the fly's ability to sense body rotations, process this information, and actuate the wing motions that generate corrective aerodynamic torque. Thus, like early man-made aircraft and modern fighter jets, the fruit fly employs an automatic stabilization scheme that reacts to short time-scale disturbances.flight control | insect flight | stability | perturbation | fruit fly L ocomotion through natural environments demands mechanisms that maintain stability in the face of unpredictable disturbances. Behavioral strategies play a particularly important role in controlling the flight of insects (1-7), because even gentle air currents can cause large disruptions to the intended flight path. Insects must also contend with the intrinsic instability of flapping flight (8, 9) and the large fluctuations in aerodynamic forces caused by slight variations in wing motions (10, 11). Corrective behavior often takes advantage of vision (1, 2). For fruit flies, however, reaction time to visual stimuli is at least 10 wingbeats (12), so these insects must employ faster sensory circuits to recover from short time-scale disturbances and instabilities. To probe this fast control strategy, we devised an experimental method that imposes impulsive mechanical disturbances (6, 13) to flying insects while allowing us to measure relevant aspects of flight behavior. We first glue tiny ferromagnetic pins to fruit flies and image their free flight using three orthogonally oriented highspeed video cameras (Methods and SI Text). When a fly enters the filming volume, an optical trigger detects the insect, initiates recording, and activates a pair of Helmholtz coils that produce a magnetic field. The field and pin are both oriented horizontally, so the resulting torque on the pin reorients the yaw, or heading angle, of the insect (Fig. 1). We then use a new motion tracking technique to extract the three-dimensional body and w...

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“…This is plausible since such an approach should lead to an almost symmetrical activity in the two sensory input neurons which is transformed to only small saccade amplitudes by the saccadic controller. The generation of large saccades in response to strong frontal expansion flow, as discussed recently for Drosophila (Bender and Dickinson 2006) could solve this problem. Similar mechanisms to avoid frontal expansion were also proposed (Neumann 2004) and successfully tested on robots (Webb et al 2004).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Nonetheless, it is not clear so far what triggers saccades in blowflies. For the fruit fly Drosophila, it was concluded that a visual trigger feature for saccades is fronto-lateral image expansion (Bender and Dickinson 2006;Tammero and Dickinson 2002a,b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Saccadic flight strategy facilitates collision avoidance: closed-loop performance of a cyberfly

et al. 2008

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Behavioural and electrophysiological experiments suggest that blowflies employ an active saccadic strategy of flight and gaze control to separate the rotational from the translational optic flow components. As a consequence, this allows motion sensitive neurons to encode during translatory intersaccadic phases of locomotion information about the spatial layout of the environment. So far, it has not been clear whether and how a motor controller could decode the responses of these neurons to prevent a blowfly from colliding with obstacles. Here we propose a simple model of the blowfly visual course control system, named cyberfly, and investigate its performance and limitations. The sensory input module of the cyberfly emulates a pair of output neurons subserving the two eyes of the blowfly visual motion pathway. We analyse two sensory-motor interfaces (SMI). An SMI coupling the differential signal of the sensory neurons proportionally to the yaw rotation fails to avoid obstacles. A more plausible SMI is based on a saccadic controller. Even with sideward drift after saccades as is characteristic of real blowflies, the cyberfly is able to successfully avoid collisions with obstacles. The relative distance information contained in the optic flow during translatory movements between saccades is provided to the SMI by the responses of the visual output neurons. An obvious limitation of this simple mechanism is its strong dependence on the textural properties of the environment.

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Visual stimulation of saccades in magnetically tetheredDrosophila

Cited by 141 publications

References 48 publications

Visual Edge Orientation Shapes Free-Flight Behavior in Drosophila

Visual Edge Orientation Shapes Free-Flight Behavior in Drosophila

Discovering the flight autostabilizer of fruit flies by inducing aerial stumbles

Saccadic flight strategy facilitates collision avoidance: closed-loop performance of a cyberfly

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