Video: A virtual environment for flies makes it possible for them to control a real-world robot
HOW does a fly fly? Exactly how the insects control their flight, using only a few hundred neurons, is a bit of a mystery. But now roboticists are hoping to work out how they do it 鈥� using a system that lets fruit flies 鈥渄rive鈥� a remote-controlled car.
First, a fruit fly is tethered to a rod with a cylindrical LED display around it. The display shows geometric patterns that are known to make a fruit fly move left or right 鈥� a kind of virtual reality simulator for flies. Since the fly is tethered, it can鈥檛 actually move, but it tries to anyway. 鈥淭he fly鈥檚 pretty dumb,鈥� says roboticist Brad Nelson, who created the 鈥渇lyborg鈥� with colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
The patterns on the display are triggered by images transmitted from a camera mounted on a miniature robotic car. If the car approaches an obstacle, the display shows the appropriate pattern and the fly reacts accordingly. As it does so, another camera detects minute changes in the movements of its wings. 鈥淲e measure the lift force and kinematics in real time,鈥� says Nelson.
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This information is then sent back to the robotic car as instructions that tell it which way to steer in order to avoid the obstacle. The process is repeated every time the car looks like it鈥檚 going to crash into something, and has been successfully used to pilot the car as it whizzes through a forest of pillars (see video, right).
鈥淭he fly鈥檚 movements guided a remote-controlled car through a forest of pillars鈥�
While isolated neurons have previously been used to control a robot鈥檚 movements, studying an entire organism鈥檚 movements should help the researchers develop an understanding of how flies can perform complex manoeuvres using relatively little brain power.
Nelson鈥檚 team ultimately plans to build up a complete computational model of a fly鈥檚 neural network by systematically knocking out the genes that encode for flight-control neurons in real flies and using the simulator to see how these changes affect behaviour.
The technology might eventually be used to control a flying robot, such as the miniature fly-like devices created by Robert Wood at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts 鈥� although Wood points out that any control system would still have to be made small enough to fit into the robot fly.
