Measurement and Analysis of Insect’s Odor Source Searching Behavior using Virtual Reality System

Abstract

Finding the odor source is one of the difficult tasks for an autonomous robot because it is difficult to detect the odor information. On the other hand, insects have the ability to find the odor source by integrating multiple sensory information. However, this multimodal information processing has not yet been elucidated because it is difficult to measure the relationship between input environmental information and output behavior based on free walking experiments. In this paper, therefore, we constructed a virtual reality system (VR) that can measure the relationship between the multiple sensory input timing and behavioral output for analyzing the insect odor source search behavior.