Flying in Complex Environments: Can Insects Bind Multiple Sensory Perceptions and What Could Be the Lessons for Machine Vision?

Abstract

The possibility of having flying machines in complex natural environments presents many exciting possibilities, but also technical challenges. Insects often rely on visual cues for flight and decision making, and recent work suggests that the perception of wind force through tactile sensory inputs also provides important information for flight control. However, the extent to which these respective cues might potentially be bound together in the brain to enable accurate decisions remains untested. Here we discuss recent evidence that the brain of insects possesses mechanisms that may allow for the binding of complex multisensory information, and we propose an experiment that could dissect whether insects like bees may have such a capacity. We additionally discuss areas of the bee brain that might facilitate decision making in order to provide a road map forward for future work on understanding the mechanisms of flying in complex natural environments.