Dragonfly preying on flying insects, rendezvous search games, and rendezvous and docking in space explorations

Dragonfly adults are predatory, and they demonstrate extraordinary capability to prey on flying insects. Significant understanding of this dragonfly behavior has been achieved in last 3 decades. Some species of dragonflies are the so-called ldquoperchersrdquo because they sit-and-wait for preys. Some other species of dragonflies are the so-called ldquohawkersrdquo who forage in flight by swooping up to grab prey insects passing overhead (Olberg et al. 1980, 2007). According to Olberg et al. (2000, 2005), this exceptional feat in intercepting and capturing prey insects (with as high as 97% success) are guided by their large compound eyes (each eye may consists of as many as 28000 facets). This amazingly versatile behavior can be abstracted as three interdependent processes: (1) decision to take off and initiate the pursuit; (2) navigating to intercept the prey; (3) coordinating leg movements in space and time to grab the prey. Although the exact mechanisms is still not well understood, it is clear that dragonflies are able to accurately estimate the distance from the passing object, over surprising long ranges, to make take-off decision in pursuit of a flying prey. In this paper, the author first reviews the state-of-the-art research on this extraordinary feat of the dragonfly and then explore the potential to harness it for precise rendezvous and docking in space explorations. To achieve the objective, the first necessary step is to capture the behavior process with realistic and ideally precise mathematical models. However, it appears that the existing object tracking algorithms alone may be insufficient for the modeling task. The author suggests that the search game (SG), rendezvous search game (RSG), and rendezvous search game with evasion are applied to capture the behavior process, particularly, the cognitive decision-making process. Finally, the author proposes a two-layer modeling architecture in which SG/RSG are used at the strategic level and the traditiona- l object tracking algorithms at the tactical level.