Active vision improves sensory acquisition and coordinates motor control in insect flight

Animals, like many robots, are constantly in motion. As they move, their own movements shape the information that is acquired by their sensory systems. Unexpected perturbations, such as a gust of wind knocking a flying insect off course, complicates not just locomotion, but sensing itself. We studied how flying fruit flies overcome these challenges by actively controlling their head to shape the visual inputs that are sensed by the eyes. We revealed that head movements rapid slowed down visual disturbances, thereby reducing motion blur and allowing flies to encode visual motion speeds more than twice as large as current models of insect vision purport. Wing steering efforts followed head movements by 30 ms, revealing a temporal order where the head filters visual information which then shapes downstream wing steering efforts. By comparing the responses of head-free and head-fixed flies, we revealed that head movements increased the strength and power of downstream wing steering efforts and improved coordination between the wings and visual input, demonstrating that active sensing can enhance motor control. Our results provide inspiration for the control of an active sensor on a moving body in robotic visual guidance systems.