Meeting Abstract
Flying insects are frequently confronted with spatially and temporally complex aerial environments. Avoiding collisions, predation, or excessive energy expenditure in such environments may require robust navigation and control behaviors. The study of flight mechanics and control in cluttered aerial environments will thus shed light on the behaviors and physical limitations of animal flight in natural environments, and possibly translate into advances in robotic design and control laws for flying micro-aerial vehicles. Control and maneuvering within complex structured airspace is especially important for pollinating insects such as the bumblebee (Bombus impatiens). Foraging bumblebees fly many foraging flights per day in which they navigate between tens to hundreds of flowers on a single foraging bout. Here we describe an experimental methodology to observe the flight of freely behaving bumblebee workers challenged to maneuver through a cluttered aerial environment. We challenge bumblebee colony members to fly through an array of randomly placed posts situated at the nest entrance which have a characteristic mean-free path length scale of 4.1±2.0 cm and which enforces sinuous flight paths through the observation arena. Flight recordings are triggered through motion detected in the observation arena and are tracked at 300Hz, converted to 3D coordinates, and archived. Flight tracking is triggered automatically and between June and August we observed 7,105 flights through the arena. Median speed was 26.7 cm/s consistent with previous observations of maneuvering flight by bumblebees. We observed that collision avoidance maneuvers were initiated in response to oncoming obstacles and we discuss obstacle avoidance strategies in free flight.
