Bioinspired engineering of exploration systems for NASA and DoD

A new approach called bioinspired engineering of exploration systems (BEES) and its value for solving pressing NASA and DoD needs are described. Insects (for example honeybees and dragonflies) cope remarkably well with their world, despite possessing a brain containing less than 0.01% as many neurons as the human brain. Although most insects have immobile eyes with fixed focus optics and lack stereo vision, they use a number of ingenious, computationally simple strategies for perceiving their world in three dimensions and navigating successfully within it. We are distilling selected insect-inspired strategies to obtain novel solutions for navigation, hazard avoidance, altitude hold, stable flight, terrain following, and gentle deployment of payload. Such functionality provides potential solutions for future autonomous robotic space and planetary explorers. A BEES approach to developing lightweight low-power autonomous flight systems should be useful for flight control of such biomorphic flyers for both NASA and DoD needs. Recent biological studies of mammalian retinas confirm that representations of multiple features of the visual world are systematically parsed and processed in parallel. Features are mapped to a stack of cellular strata within the retina. Each of these representations can be efficiently modeled in semiconductor cellular nonlinear network (CNN) chips. We describe recent breakthroughs in exploring the feasibility of the unique blending of insect strategies of navigation with mammalian visual search, pattern recognition, and image understanding into hybrid biomorphic flyers for future planetary and terrestrial applications. We describe a few future mission scenarios for Mars exploration, uniquely enabled by these newly developed biomorphic flyers

Wiedererkennung ungefilterter und Fourier-gefilterter Schwarzweißmuster duch Honigbienen (Apis mellifera L.)

Honigbienen (Apis mellifera L.) sind in der Lage mit ihren Komplexaugen visuelle Muster wahrzunehmen und die Musterinformation im Zentralen Nervensystem zu speichern und für Ähnlichkeitsbewertungen wieder abzurufen. Die vorliegende Arbeit zeigt klare Evidenz gegen eine ausschließliche Bewertung von Schwarzweißmustern mit Hilfe von Template-Matching-Mechanismen. Mit systematisch abgewandelten Dressurparadigmen trainierte Bienen bewerteten Muster unabhängig von der erfolgten Dressur stets bevorzugt gemäß eher grober Mustereigenschaften, wie zum Beispiel die Parameter "schwarzer Musterzentralbereich" und "Musterzerstreutheit". Veränderte man in einem weiteren Versuchansatz die Musterinformation der Schwarzweißmuster zudem gezielt durch geeignete Fourier-Filterung, zeigte sich, dass Bienen zur Musterdiskriminierung bereits die Frequenzinformation von 2 - 8 Schwingungen/Bildbreite genügte. Diese Unschärfe der bewerteten Bildinformation ließ sich nicht ausschließlich aus den optischen Eigenschaften des visuellen Apparates der Bienen ableiten. Videodokumentationen und Einzelbildanalyse des Flugverhaltens der Bienen vor den Mustern ergaben zudem keinerlei Hinweise für eine Nutzung des Flugverhaltens als Bewertungsgrundlage zur Musterdiskriminierung. Die erhaltenen Ergebnisse zur Musterdiskriminierung wurden vor dem Hintergrund eines ökonomischen Entscheidungsmodells für menschliches Verhalten, den Frugalheuristiken, diskutiert und Hinweise auf eine ökonomische Bewertungsstrategie der Bienen entsprechend einer Take-The-Best-Heuristik gefunden.Honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) are able to perceive visual patterns through their compound eyes and store the visual information in the central nervous system for subsequent use in pattern discrimination tasks. This thesis provides clear evidence against the assumption that pattern discrimination relies exclusively on template matching mechanisms. Bees discriminated pairs of patterns preferential using extracted pattern parameters. Within this thesis the preferred parameters of the bees following the training paradigms were coarse parameters such as "black centre" and "pattern disruption". In experiments with Fourier filtered patterns the frequency information of the patterns were additionally reduced. The results showed that bees could discriminate patterns using only 2 - 8 cycles/pattern-width of the frequency information. The fuzziness of the exploited visual information could not be assigned to restrictions of the visual system of bees. Additional documentation and single picture analysis of the videotaped flight behaviour in front of the patterns provided no evidence for bees using their flight behaviour in order to enhance the pattern discrimination ability. Application of economic human decision models (frugal heuristics) to the behavioural results showed clues that bees'' decisions could be explained with the help of the Take-The-Best-heuristic