ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2021
Oscillations make a self-scaled model for honeybees' visual odometer reliable regardless of flight trajectory.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- Logarithmic coding leads to adaptive stabilization in the presence of sensorimotor delays.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Bumblebees locate goals in 3D with absolute height estimation from ventral optic flow.The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Article
- Path integration and optic flow in flying insects: a review of current evidence.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2025Review
- Lessons from natural flight for aviation: then, now and tomorrow.The Journal of experimental biology · 2023Review
- Floor and ceiling mirror configurations to study altitude control in honeybees.Biology letters · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Honeybees foraging and recruiting nest-mates by performing the waggle dance need to be able to gauge the flight distance to the food source regardless of the wind and terrain conditions. Previous authors have hypothesized that the foragers' visual odometer mathematically integrates the angular velocity of the ground image sweeping backward across their ventral viewfield, known as translational optic flow. The question arises as to how mathematical integration of optic flow (usually expressed in radians/s) can reliably encode distances, regardless of the height and speed of flight. The vertical self-oscillatory movements observed in honeybees trigger expansions and contractions of the optic flow vector field, yielding an additional visual cue called optic flow divergence. We have developed a self-scaled model for the visual odometer in which the translational optic flow is scaled by the visually estimated current clearance from the ground. In simulation, this model, which we have called SOFIa, was found to be reliable in a large range of flight trajectories, terrains and wind conditions. It reduced the statistical dispersion of the estimated flight distances approximately 10-fold in comparison with the mathematically integrated raw optic flow model. The SOFIa model can be directly implemented in robotic applications based on minimalistic visual equipment.
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