
Designing a Collision Avoidance System by Watching Locusts Watch Star Wars - vezycash
https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/collision-avoidance-star-wars-locusts/
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tonyarkles
Ooooh! Story time!

In 2005 and 2006, I worked in a biology lab that worked on similar things as
Dr. Rind's lab. I don't recall if we collaborated directly, but there was
definitely a lot of overlap and I think we shared papers back and forth.

When I arrived, the biologists had rigged up a pretty amazing setup. They had
a system that was measuring locust wing-muscle activations, and feeding that
in through a joystick port to Descent (yes, the game). This was a more closed-
loop version of the "watching Star Wars" stuff talked about in the article.
The system had a couple flaws, though. The biggest being that it was being
projected onto a hemispherical dome that the locust sat in, but the scene
wasn't perspective-corrected for the dome. It still worked, sort of though;
you could watch the insect successfully navigate around obstacles, but it was
pretty crude.

Over the two summers (I was a student at the time), I did the majority of
development on a more controlled and perspective-corrected system for them. It
included a simple scripting language (since I had, you know, just finished my
compilers course) for the scientists to describe specific scenes to project
for the insect, instead of just using the pre-made Descent levels. It did some
really cool projecting mapping, such that, given a known position of the
insect's eyes relative to the hemispherical screen, we could project
perspective-correct 3D imagery. It had a USB device for more predictable input
than the joystick port. And it included time synchronization signals that
could be fed back into the muscle-impulse-capture hardware to more easily
correlate events in the 3D scene with muscle events.

I haven't kept in touch with the lab much, but last I heard they're still
using a derivative of the system I helped build there. The USB controller died
at some point and was replaced with an Arduino, and I think some new summer
students have tweaked this and that, but best I can tell the system is still
mostly alive (even if it's been through a Ship of Theseus transformation).

The results were really cool too! You could watch the insect successfully
navigate around obstacles by changing the timing differential between
wingbeats!

Anyway... I'm happy to chat about this more if anyone's interested, with the
caveat that I'm not a biologist and was way more focused on the EE and CS
aspects of doing the measurements. I do recall that there was a particular
neuron that was being investigated (the Descending Contralateral Motion
Detector - DCMD) in our lab, but don't know a whole lot more than that.

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foxyv
It would be pretty unfortunate if suddenly my car was attracted to bright
lights and bug zappers. /joke/

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cimmanom
That's kind of cool. But I hope we wouldn't be satisfied with a 91% collision
avoidance rate.

