IPAB Workshop-11/07/2024 Speaker: Evripidis Gkanias Title: How insects navigate without GPS? Abstract: Obviously, insects do not use GPS to navigate, but they can still dead reckon effectively to known food sources and migrate to unknown places that are thousands of kilometers away. To achieve this, they use a celestial compass to detect the sun’s position and compensate for the sun’s movement. In my talk, I will explain how this can be achieved by simply detecting the sunlight and geomagnetic field. I will describe how the compound eyes of insects transform the daylight into an estimate of the sun’s position under cloudy and occluded skies, and how we transformed this knowledge into a compass sensor prototype that can be used by robots. I will also describe how insect can compensate for the sun’s movement by using information of time and their geometric latitude and provide plausible mechanisms that estimate these values by integrating daylight or using the inclination of the earth’s magnetic field. Our model is bounded by the information that is available to insects and the anatomy of their brain, and the neural processes of our model are mapped to specific neurons where possible. This anatomical map revealed a mechanism that uses simple trigonometric identities to integrate spatial and temporal information in the insect brain, where both information is represented by sinusoidal functions. At the end of my talk, I will demonstrate how our model performs in foraging and migrating scenarios, including crossing the equator where it needs to switch between a clockwise and counterclockwise movement of the sun. Jul 11 2024 13.00 - 14.00 IPAB Workshop-11/07/2024 Evripidis Gkanias G03
IPAB Workshop-11/07/2024 Speaker: Evripidis Gkanias Title: How insects navigate without GPS? Abstract: Obviously, insects do not use GPS to navigate, but they can still dead reckon effectively to known food sources and migrate to unknown places that are thousands of kilometers away. To achieve this, they use a celestial compass to detect the sun’s position and compensate for the sun’s movement. In my talk, I will explain how this can be achieved by simply detecting the sunlight and geomagnetic field. I will describe how the compound eyes of insects transform the daylight into an estimate of the sun’s position under cloudy and occluded skies, and how we transformed this knowledge into a compass sensor prototype that can be used by robots. I will also describe how insect can compensate for the sun’s movement by using information of time and their geometric latitude and provide plausible mechanisms that estimate these values by integrating daylight or using the inclination of the earth’s magnetic field. Our model is bounded by the information that is available to insects and the anatomy of their brain, and the neural processes of our model are mapped to specific neurons where possible. This anatomical map revealed a mechanism that uses simple trigonometric identities to integrate spatial and temporal information in the insect brain, where both information is represented by sinusoidal functions. At the end of my talk, I will demonstrate how our model performs in foraging and migrating scenarios, including crossing the equator where it needs to switch between a clockwise and counterclockwise movement of the sun. Jul 11 2024 13.00 - 14.00 IPAB Workshop-11/07/2024 Evripidis Gkanias G03
