Flight Control of Tethered Honeybees Using Neural Electrical Stimulation

This paper presents an insect-machine interface for controlling the flight behavior of tethered honeybees. Flight initiation and cessation can be reproducibly generated using electrical pulses between two wire electrodes implanted into the honeybee's brain. Experiments are conducted to compare the effect of different stimulus patterns on the honeybee's behavior by parameters including success rate, response time and flight duration. The preliminary results enable us to carry out further research works on the control of complex flight behaviors or the neural mechanism of insect flight.