Estimating the goals of biological and engineered flight controllers from their trajectories

What is it about?

We present a mathematical technique that allows us to extract the closed loop controller used in a flight trajectory, and an inverse design approach that allows us to "reverse engineer" what that controller optimizes.

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Why is it important?

Insects solve the flight control problem in a manner that is both robust to unstructured disturbances and uses minimal computational resources, but engineering models for how the achieve this performance have not yet been formalized. Applying techniques like optimal identification (OID) allows us to isolate the functionality of the onboard controller circuits.