A model of exploration and goal-searching in the cockroach, <i>Blaberus discoidalis</i>

Daltorio, Kathryn A.; Tietz, Brian R.; Bender, John A.; Webster, Victoria A.; Szczecinski, Nicholas S.; Branicky, M.S.; Ritzmann, Roy E.; Quinn, Roger D.

doi:10.1177/1059712313491615

Cited by 19 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Because cockroaches have a strong tendency to remain near walls, but greatly prefer the dark, we expected individuals to wall-follow until they detected the dark shelter then move directly toward that part of the arena (Daltorio et al, 2013). The paths that they took did not support that hypothesis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Spatial Navigation and the Central Complex: Sensory Acquisition, Orientation, and Motor Control

Varga

Kathman

Martin

et al. 2017

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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Cockroaches are scavengers that forage through dark, maze-like environments. Like other foraging animals, for instance rats, they must continually asses their situation to keep track of targets and negotiate barriers. While navigating a complex environment, all animals need to integrate sensory information in order to produce appropriate motor commands. The integrated sensory cues can be used to provide the animal with an environmental and contextual reference frame for the behavior. To successfully reach a goal location, navigational cues continuously derived from sensory inputs have to be utilized in the spatial guidance of motor commands. The sensory processes, contextual and spatial mechanisms, and motor outputs contributing to navigation have been heavily studied in rats. In contrast, many insect studies focused on the sensory and/or motor components of navigation, and our knowledge of the abstract representation of environmental context and spatial information in the insect brain is relatively limited. Recent reports from several laboratories have explored the role of the central complex (CX), a sensorimotor region of the insect brain, in navigational processes by recording the activity of CX neurons in freely-moving insects and in more constrained, experimenter-controlled situations. The results of these studies indicate that the CX participates in processing the temporal and spatial components of sensory cues, and utilizes these cues in creating an internal representation of orientation and context, while also directing motor control. Although these studies led to a better understanding of the CX's role in insect navigation, there are still major voids in the literature regarding the underlying mechanisms and brain regions involved in spatial navigation. The main goal of this review is to place the above listed findings in the wider context of animal navigation by providing an overview of the neural mechanisms of navigation in rats and summarizing and comparing our current knowledge on the CX's role in insect navigation to these processes. By doing so, we aimed to highlight some of the missing puzzle pieces in insect navigation and provide a different perspective for future directions.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An algorithm, called RAMBLER, simulated the movements of the insect quite well (Daltorio et al, 2013). Under this scheme, a simulated cockroach evaluates whether it is still in contact with the wall and whether it can still see the dark shelter.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial Navigation and the Central Complex: Sensory Acquisition, Orientation, and Motor Control

Varga

Kathman

Martin

et al. 2017

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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“…Swarm robotics mainly focuses on coordination control mechanisms within a group of homogeneous or heterogeneous robots by following collective and decentralized decision-making approaches that are mainly inspired by nature [1]. There are many swarm behaviors such as collective motion and flocking [2][3][4][5], aggregation [6,7], foraging [8,9], exploration [10], Fig. 1 A real-world scenario where leaders mark an area of interest using formation control.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

SDP-Based Robust Formation-Containment Coordination of Swarm Robotic Systems with Input Saturation

Lennox

et al. 2021

J Intell Robot Syst

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There are many potential applications of swarm robotic systems in real-world scenarios. In this paper, formation-containment controller design for single-integrator and double-integrator swarm robotic systems with input saturation is investigated. The swarm system contains two types of robots—leaders and followers. A novel control protocol and an implementation algorithm are proposed that enable the leaders to achieve the desired formation via semidefinite programming (SDP) techniques. The followers then converge into the convex hull formed by the leaders simultaneously. In contrast to conventional consensus-based formation control methods, the relative formation reference signal is not required in the real-time data transmission, which provides greater feasibility for implementation on hardware platforms. The effectiveness of the proposed formation-containment control algorithm is demonstrated with both numerical simulations and experiments using real robots that utilize the miniature mobile robot, Mona.

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“…We created a laboratory device enabling precise control and systematic variation of compliant vertical beam parameters ( figure 3A). We used high-speed and standard imaging to record cockroaches traversing the beam obstacle field, and used an ethogram analysis (Harley et al 2009, Daltorio et al 2013, Blaesing and Cruse 2004 to quantify its locomotor pathway of traversal. To test our body shape hypothesis, we conducted direct experiments modifying the cockroach's body shape by systematically adding a series of artificial shells.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Terradynamically streamlined shapes in animals and robots enhance traversability through densely cluttered terrain

Li¹,

Pullin²,

Haldane³

et al. 2015

Bioinspir. Biomim.

121

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Many animals, modern aircraft, and underwater vehicles use fusiform, streamlined body shapes that reduce fluid dynamic drag to achieve fast and effective locomotion in air and water. Similarly, numerous small terrestrial animals move through cluttered terrain where three-dimensional, multicomponent obstacles like grass, shrubs, vines, and leaf litter also resist motion, but it is unknown whether their body shape plays a major role in traversal. Few ground vehicles or terrestrial robots have used body shape to more effectively traverse environments such as cluttered terrain. Here, we challenged forest-floor-dwelling discoid cockroaches (Blaberus discoidalis) possessing a thin, rounded body to traverse tall, narrowly spaced, vertical, grass-like compliant beams. Animals displayed high traversal performance (79 ± 12% probability and 3.4 ± 0.7 s time). Although we observed diverse obstacle traversal strategies, cockroaches primarily (48 ± 9 % probability) used a novel roll maneuver, a form of natural parkour, allowing them to rapidly traverse obstacle gaps narrower than half their body width (2.0 ± 0.5 s traversal time). Reduction of body roundness by addition of artificial shells nearly inhibited roll maneuvers and decreased traversal performance.Inspired by this discovery, we added a thin, rounded exoskeletal shell to a legged robot with a nearly cuboidal body, common to many existing terrestrial robots. Without adding sensory feedback or changing the open-loop control, the rounded shell enabled the robot to traverse beam obstacles with gaps narrower than shell width via body roll. Terradynamically "streamlined" shapes can reduce terrain resistance and enhance traversability by assisting effective body reorientation Bioinspiration & Biomimetics (2015), 10, 046003; https://li.me.jhu.edu 2 via distributed mechanical feedback. Our findings highlight the need to consider body shape to improve robot mobility in real-world terrain often filled with clutter, and to develop better locomotor-ground contact models to understand interaction with 3-D, multi-component terrain. This image entitled 'Giant 'shrooms' has been obtained by the author from the Flickr website where it was made available by wonderferret under a CC BY 2.0 licence.] Here, we propose to advance terradynamics (Li et al. 2013) into three dimensions by going beyond relatively uniform, two-dimensional surfaces with three-dimensional obstacles of diverse, complex topology and mechanics, such as encountered in a forest floor with grass, shrubs, trees, and fungi (figure 1). In particular, small insects, arachnids, and reptiles face considerable challenges traversing such terrain, because these obstacles, which may be negligible for large animals, can be comparable or even much larger in size than themselves (Kaspari and Weiser 1999). Further, these obstacles can be densely cluttered with gaps, slits, and crevices comparable or even smaller than an animal's body, often pushing back against the animals, absorbing energy, and resisting locomotion, similar to surroun...

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A model of exploration and goal-searching in the cockroach, Blaberus discoidalis

Cited by 19 publications

References 43 publications

Spatial Navigation and the Central Complex: Sensory Acquisition, Orientation, and Motor Control

Spatial Navigation and the Central Complex: Sensory Acquisition, Orientation, and Motor Control

SDP-Based Robust Formation-Containment Coordination of Swarm Robotic Systems with Input Saturation

Terradynamically streamlined shapes in animals and robots enhance traversability through densely cluttered terrain

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