Flight dynamics and control of evasive maneuvers: the fruit fly's takeoff.
We have approached the problem of reverse-engineering the flight control mechanism of the fruit fly by studying the dynamics of the responses to a visual stimulus during takeoff. Building upon a prior framework [G. Card and M. Dickinson, J. Exp. Biol., vol. 211, pp. 341-353, 2008], we seek to understand the strategies employed by the animal to stabilize attitude and orientation during these evasive, highly dynamical maneuvers. As a first step, we consider the dynamics from a gray-box perspective: examining lumped forces produced by the insect's legs and wings. The reconstruction of the flight initiation dynamics, based on the unconstrained motion formulation for a rigid body, allows us to assess the fly's responses to a variety of initial conditions induced by its jump. Such assessment permits refinement by using a visual tracking algorithm to extract the kinematic envelope of the wings [E. I. Fontaine, F. Zabala, M. Dickinson, and J. Burdick, "Wing and body motion during flight initiation in Drosophila revealed by automated visual tracking," submitted for publication] in order to estimate lift and drag forces [F. Zabala, M. Dickinson, and R. Murray, "Control and stability of insect flight during highly dynamical maneuvers," submitted for publication], and recording actual leg-joint kinematics and using them to estimate jump forces [F. Zabala, "A bio-inspired model for directionality control of flight initiation," to be published.]. In this paper, we present the details of our approach in a comprehensive manner, including the salient results.
Zabala
Francisco A
FA
Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA. zabala@caltech.edu
Card
Gwyneth M
GM
Fontaine
Ebraheem I
EI
Dickinson
Michael H
MH
Murray
Richard M
RM
D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena / Q000502:physiology*; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000502:physiology*; D004924:Escape Reaction / Q000502:physiology*; D005426:Flight, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D014741:Video Recording