370 research outputs found
The correlation between wing kinematics and steering muscle activity in the blowfly Calliphora vicina
Determining how the motor patterns of the nervous system are converted into the mechanical and behavioral output of the body is a central goal in the study of locomotion. In the case of dipteran flight, a population of small steering muscles controls many of the subtle changes in wing kinematics that allow flies to maneuver rapidly. We filmed the wing motion of tethered Calliphora vicina at high speed and simultaneously recorded multi-channel electromyographic signals from some of the prominent steering muscles in order to correlate kinematics with muscle activity. Using this analysis, we found that the timing of each spike in the basalare muscles was strongly correlated with changes in the deviation of the stroke plane during the downstroke. The relationship was non-linear such that the magnitude of the kinematic response to each muscle spike decreased with increasing levels of stroke deviation. This result suggests that downstroke deviation is controlled in part via the mechanical summation of basalare activity. We also found that interactions among the basalares and muscles III2–III4 determine the maximum forward amplitude of the wingstroke. In addition, activity in muscle I1 appears to participate in a wingbeat gearing mechanism, as previously proposed. Using these results, we have been able to correlate changes in wing kinematics with alteration in the spike rate, firing phase and combinatorial activity of identified steering muscles
Neuromuscular control of aerodynamic forces and moments in the blowfly, Calliphora vicina
Flies are among the most agile of flying insects, a capacity that ultimately results from their nervous system's control over steering muscles and aerodynamic forces during flight. In order to investigate the relationships among neuromuscular control, musculo-skeletal mechanics and flight forces, we captured high-speed, three-dimensional wing kinematics of the blowfly, Calliphora vicina, while simultaneously recording electromyogram signals from prominent steering muscles during visually induced turns. We used the quantified kinematics to calculate the translational and rotational components of aerodynamic forces and moments using a theoretical quasi-steady model of force generation, confirmed using a dynamically scaled mechanical model of a Calliphora wing. We identified three independently controlled features of the wingbeat trajectory – downstroke deviation, dorsal amplitude and mode. Modulation of each of these kinematic features corresponded to both activity in a distinct steering muscle group and a distinct manipulation of the aerodynamic force vector. This functional specificity resulted from the independent control of downstroke and upstroke forces rather than the independent control of separate aerodynamic mechanisms. The predicted contributions of each kinematic feature to body lift, thrust, roll, yaw and pitch are discussed
Cumulative object categorization in clutter
In this paper we present an approach based on scene- or part-graphs for geometrically categorizing touching and
occluded objects. We use additive RGBD feature descriptors and hashing of graph configuration parameters for describing the spatial arrangement of constituent parts. The presented experiments quantify that this method outperforms our earlier part-voting and sliding window classification. We evaluated our approach on cluttered scenes, and by using a 3D dataset containing over 15000 Kinect scans of over 100 objects which were grouped into general geometric categories. Additionally, color, geometric, and combined features were compared for categorization tasks
Isoscalar meson spectroscopy from lattice QCD
We extract to high statistical precision an excited spectrum of
single-particle isoscalar mesons using lattice QCD, including states of high
spin and, for the first time, light exotic JPC isoscalars. The use of a novel
quark field construction has enabled us to overcome the long-standing challenge
of efficiently including quark-annihilation contributions. Hidden-flavor mixing
angles are extracted and while most states are found to be close to ideally
flavor mixed, there are examples of large mixing in the pseudoscalar and axial
sectors in line with experiment. The exotic JPC isoscalar states appear at a
mass scale comparable to the exotic isovector states.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
A novel quark-field creation operator construction for hadronic physics in lattice QCD
A new quark-field smearing algorithm is defined which enables efficient
calculations of a broad range of hadron correlation functions. The technique
applies a low-rank operator to define smooth fields that are to be used in
hadron creation operators. The resulting space of smooth fields is small enough
that all elements of the reduced quark propagator can be computed exactly at
reasonable computational cost. Correlations between arbitrary sources,
including multi hadron operators can be computed a posteriori without requiring
new lattice Dirac operator inversions. The method is tested on realistic
lattice sizes with light dynamical quarks.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure
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