Visual versus visual-inertial guidance in hawks pursuing terrestrial targets

The aerial interception behaviour of falcons is well modelled by a guidance law called proportional navigation, which commands steering at a rate proportional to the angular rate of the line-of-sight from predator to prey. Because the line-of-sight rate is defined in an inertial frame of reference, proportional navigation must be implemented using visual-inertial sensor fusion. By contrast, the aerial pursuit behaviour of hawks chasing terrestrial targets is better modelled by a mixed guidance law combining information on the line-of-sight rate with information on the deviation angle between the attacker’s velocity and the line-of-sight. Here we ask whether this behaviour may be controlled using visual information alone. We use high-speed motion capture to record n = 228 flights from N = 4 Harris’ hawks Parabuteo unicinctus, and show that proportional navigation and mixed guidance both model their trajectories well. The mixed guidance law also models the data closely when visual-inertial information on the line-of-sight rate is replaced by visual information on the motion of the target relative to its background. Although the visual-inertial form of the mixed guidance law provides the closest fit, all three guidance laws provide an adequate phenomenological model of the behavioural data, whilst making different predictions on the physiological pathways involved.