Bumblebees minimize control challenges by combining active and passive modes in unsteady winds
Sridhar Ravi, Dmitry Kolomenskiy, Thomas Engels, Kai Schneider, Chun, Wang, Joern Sesterhenn, Hao Liu

TL;DR
This study reveals how bumblebees adapt their flight control by combining passive and active strategies to navigate unsteady winds, enhancing understanding of insect flight stability in complex airflow environments.
Contribution
It introduces a novel mechanism showing bees passively ride high-frequency perturbations while actively correcting at lower frequencies, combining experiments with simulations.
Findings
Bees exhibit increased movement in unsteady vortex streets.
Passive riding of high-frequency perturbations aids stability.
Active control is used for low-frequency corrections.
Abstract
The natural wind environment that volant insects encounter is unsteady and highly complex, posing significant flight control and stability challenges. Unsteady airflows can range from structured chains of discrete vortices shed in the wake of an object to fully developed chaotic turbulence. It is critical to understand the flight control strategies insects employ to safely navigate in natural environments. We combined experiments on free flying bumblebees with high fidelity numerical simulations and lower order modeling to identify the salient mechanics that mediate insect flight in unsteady winds. We trained bumblebees to fly upwind towards an artificial flower in a wind tunnel under steady wind and in a von Karman street (23Hz) formed in the wake of a cylinder. The bees displayed significantly higher movement in the unsteady vortex street compared to steady winds. Correlation analysis…
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Taxonomy
TopicsBiomimetic flight and propulsion mechanisms · Sports Dynamics and Biomechanics · Insect and Arachnid Ecology and Behavior
