A Flight Simulator For Flies Helps Humans Build Better UAVs
Flies may not seem like nature's ace pilots when they're bumping up against a closed window or getting squashed beneath a rolled-up copy of the New York Times Magazine, but a German company hopes to unravel the secrets of insect flight by tapping their brains. Literally. The company Cognition for Technical Systems (CoTeSys) has designed a flight simulator for flies. They hope that analyzing the fly's brain while it navigates a simulated flight path will provide the data needed to design super-agile micro-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The simulator (pictured below), shows a rapid succession of flashing patterns and moving shapes that mimic objects a fly might have to navigate. Electrodes monitor the brain waves of the fly, and a computer process those brain signals into patterns understandable to those without compound eyes. Analyzing the data, the CoTeSys researchers discovered that the fly constructs...