Ever wonder how an insect with such a tiny brain can thwart your attempts to catch it nearly every time? Apparently scientists do, too.
To find out how the common blowfly manages to process visual images more than four times faster than humans, researchers have built the bug a flight simulator. After immobilizing each insect with a fly-sized harness and attaching electrodes to its brain, biologists from the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology placed blowflies in front of a semicircular LED screen displaying various moving patterns.
As the fly responded to virtual objects flying around it, the scientists used a fluorescent microscope to watch how its brain processed the images. Compared to people, who can distinguish a maximum of 25 discrete images per second, blowflies are visual virtuosos: They can sense up to 100 separate images per second and respond fast enough to change their flight direction.
The German scientists hope what they discover about insect vision will help build better flying robots. And they're not the only ones studying flies in a flight simulator — a group led by Michael Dickinson at the California Institute of Technology has used a similar setup, called Fly-O-Vision, to learn about muscle coordination and visual processing in fruit flies.
"Engineers would like to be able to build simple things that behave in complex ways, like a power grid or a robot, and one of the best ways to figure out how to get complex behavior from simple things is by studying biological organisms," wrote Dickinson in a press release last year. "It's Model Biological Systems 101: Study an animal that's easy to study, and then extrapolate."
See Also:
- Secret Law of Flying Could Inspire Better Robots
- Army: Make Us a Mini-Drone Swarm (Updated)
- Hats Off to Blowfly Researchers
- New Device: Flying Robot
Image 1: A view into the brain of a blowfly, with individual neurons highlighted by fluorescent dye, MPI Neurobiologie. Image 2: A blowfly is placed on the white bar at the bottom of this LED screen. Electrodes record brain activity as the fly watches moving patterns and shapes, MPI Neurobiologie.
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