Newswise — This fall, several biologists at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge will start building a movie theater for houseflies. It's a miniature IMAX theater--complete with a panoramic screen--inside of which they'll place a rotating cage, similar to the ones that astronauts use to simulate tumbling in space. Then they'll strap a fly into the cage and show it a movie.
A leisurely pastime for idle academics? Hardly. As Rafal Zbikowski, a researcher at Cranfield University's Royal Military College of Science, describes in the November 2005 issue of IEEE Spectrum, the common housefly is an extremely maneuverable flyer, the best of any species, insect or otherwise. What's more, its flight control commands originate from only a few hundred neurons in its brain, far less computational power than you'd find in your toaster.
These fly researchers want to know its secret. The fly-size flight simulator will reproduce the inertial effects of flight. The movie will depict panoramic scenes during flight. By inserting electrodes into the fly's brain, the biologists will be able to observe how neurons light up in response to these scenes. Their goal? To understand control from the insect's perspective. These experiments in turn will hold important lessons for the design of micro air vehicles (MAVs)--tiny flying robots that attempt to approximate insect flight--and for high-performance aircraft in general.
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