Insect Inspired Visual Control of Translatory Flight

Flying insects use highly efficient visual strategies to control their self-motion in three-dimensional space. We present a biologically inspired, minimalistic model for visual flight control in an autonomous agent. Large, specialized receptive fields exploit the distribution of local intensities and local motion in an omnidirectional field of view, extracting the information required for attitude control, course stabilization, obstacle avoidance, and altitude control. In open-loop simulations, recordings from each control mechanism robustly indicate the sign of attitude angles, self-rotation, obstacle direction and altitude deviation, respectively. Closed-loop experiments show that these signals are sufficient for three-dimensional flight stabilization with six degrees of freedom.