Demonstration of Teleoperated Bumblebee-Quadcopter System for Collision Avoidance

In this study, we investigate whether an animal-in-the-loop (AIL) system can be applied to the collision avoidance ability of a bumblebee bombus ignitus The AIL system is a novel experimental system for extracting the ability of animals to adapt to the environment and their own body by remotely controlling an autonomous mobile robot. The bumblebee causes an optomotor reflex to the optical flow and turns in the same yaw direction as it. However, it is unclear what kind of collision avoidance behavior is performed when flying toward a stationary obstacle. Therefore, we first measured collision avoidance behavior when flying toward a stationary obstacle. As a result, we found that the turning movement was elicited according to the expansion of the edge of the obstacle. Accordingly, we used this phenomenon for the AIL system in which the bumblebee remotely controls the quadcopter. As a result of presenting quadcopter first-person camera images to the bumblebee, we found avoidance behaviors elicited near the obstacle. This suggested that the AIL system can be applied to the collision avoidance ability of the bumblebee and that the behavior is changed by the expansion of the edge of the object.