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 - using a system that lets fruit flies "drive" 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 - a kind of virtual reality simulator for flies. Since the fly is tethered, it can't actually move, but it tries to anyway. "The fly's pretty dumb," says roboticist Brad Nelson, who created the "flyborg" 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 ...
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