BI 134 Mandyam Srinivasan: Bee Flight and Cognition

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Srini is Emeritus Professor at Queensland Brain Institute in Australia. In this episode, he shares his wide range of behavioral experiments elucidating the principles of flight and navigation in insects. We discuss how bees use optic flow signals to determine their speed, distance, proximity to objects, and to gracefully land. These abilities are largely governed via control systems, balancing incoming perceptual signals with internal reference signals. We also talk about a few of the aerial robotics projects his research has inspired, many of the other cognitive skills bees can learn, the possibility of their feeling pain , and the nature of their possible subjective conscious experience.

Srini's Website.Related papersVision, perception, navigation and 'cognition' in honeybees and applications to aerial robotics.

0:00 - Intro
3:34 - Background
8:20 - Bee experiments
14:30 - Bee flight and navigation
28:05 - Landing
33:06 - Umwelt and perception
37:26 - Bee-inspired aerial robotics
49:10 - Motion camouflage
51:52 - Cognition in bees
1:03:10 - Small vs. big brains
1:06:42 - Pain in bees
1:12:50 - Subjective experience
1:15:25 - Deep learning
1:23:00 - Path forward