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Abstract

Flying insects are remarkably adept at seeing and perceiving the world and navigating effectively in it, despite possessing a brain that weighs less than a milligram and carries fewer than 0.01% as many neurons as ours does. The talk will describe how honeybees use their vision to stabilize and control their flight, avoid collisions with obstacles, navigate safely through narrow passages, estimate distance flown, and orchestrate smooth landings.

Research over the past twenty years has demonstrated that honeybees display impressive 'cognitive' capacities. In addition to their well known ability to learn and discriminate colours and patterns, bees can learn to distinguish 'similar' from 'dissimilar' objects, to categorise shapes, to detect camouflaged objects, to navigate through complex mazes, to count objects encountered on the way to a food source, and to associate scents with specific foraging locations. This talk will present evidence to support these observations, and speculate on the next frontiers of research in this area.

Some of the insect-based strategies described above are being used to design, implement and test biologically-inspired algorithms for the guidance of autonomous terrestrial and aerial vehicles. Application to manoeuvres such as attitude stabilization, terrain following, obstacle avoidance, automated landing, and the execution of extreme aerobatic manoeuvres will be described.

Brief biography

Srinivasan's research focuses on the principles of visual processing, perception and cognition in simple natural systems, and on the application of these principles to machine vision and robotics.

He holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Bangalore University, a Master's degree in Electronics from the Indian Institute of Science, a Ph.D. in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University, a D.Sc. in Neuroethology from the Australian National University, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Zurich. Srinivasan is presently Professor of Visual Neuroscience at the Queensland Brain Institute and the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering of the University of Queensland. Among his awards are Fellowships of the Australian Academy of Science, of the Royal Society of London, and of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, the 2006 Australia Prime Minister's Science Prize, the 2008 U.K. Rank Prize for Optoelectronics, the 2009 Distinguished Alumni Award of the Indian Institute of Science, the Membership of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2012, the Queensland Science Championship in 2014, and the Harold Spencer-Jones Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of Navigation in 2014.