Meeting Abstract
Dragonflies are impressive aerial hunters, accurately catching their prey in chases that last less than a second. Their success hinges on not only their excellent vision but also careful positioning of their eyes relative to their bodies and their targets to efficiently extract relevant information for guidance. This general visuomotor technique is a form of active vision. Dragonflies steer their eyes with the head precisely in both conspecific pursuits and prey interceptions. This active head rotation results in a specific projection of the prey image on the retina and therefore shapes the motion statistics the visual system perceives. This project aims to analyse this head motion as the dragonfly transition from cruising flight, to prey interception and then conspecific chases. Specifically, we focus on the head roll axis which ultimately sets the visual reference frame for processing motion information. We will introduce preliminary data and analysis on the head roll with respect to target positioning and velocity in in both free-flight and tethered experiments. Active vision holds multiple advantages over traditional fixed image acquisition techniques, as although visual data holds a great amount of information, this comes at the cost of expensive computation. By tactically shaping the visual input signal, the dragonfly can inspire efficient approach to autonomous visual guidance.
