Flight Arena Design And Its Application In Yaw Behavior Research Of Bumblebee

Insect cyborg is a special robot which is built on insect carriers, with some auxiliary control device. Because of inherited remarkable insect flight capacity and manual control features, insect cyborg currently becomes the hot research topic, with broad application prospects in security, scientific research, exploration, search and rescue and other fields. How to control the flight behavior of insects is the emphasis in the research of insect cyborg. Traditional research mainly uses electrical stimulation to control the flight behavior of which the nerve pathways activated is unclear. Besides, the new method of optic flow stimulation based on the mature results of insect visual perception pathway controls the flight behavior of insect as well. In this thesis, bumblebees are employed as the insect carriers and two aspects of research work has been carried out.(1).A complete set of flight arena has been designed according to the visual properties of the bumblebees, which includes optic flow generator, insects’ fixator, data acquisition systems etc. In the hardware design of optic flow generator, a modular and parallel design method has been introduced and central control module uses the unified management of multiple parallel LED dot matrix. High-speed CAN bus is employed to link the central control module and LED dot matrices to achieve the refresh rate and optic flow speed, with the system feature of online configurations and real-time control. Experimental evaluation shows that the flight arena can reach a maximum refresh rate of 5.7 KHz and maximum image rotating velocity is 4.8m/s.(2).Use flight arena to research the yaw behavior of the bumblebees. A single bright strip rotated in clockwise and counterclockwise is used to stimulate the tethered bumblebee and a camera to record the abdomen swinging behavior, getting abdomen swing angle data. The relationship between optic flow and the angle of the bumblebee abdomen swing has been analyzed. At the same time, the relationship of the number of strip and the yaw angle is described, proving that the flight arena can be used to induce the yaw behavior of the bumblebee. That is to say, when optic flow rotates in clockwise, bumblebees will rotate in counterclockwise direction on its yaw axis, and vice versa.