While lacking a certain amount of grace, flying insects manage to do a whole lot with quite a little. Each compound eye of a housefly picks up about 3,000 pixels of info, and that data, paired with a few neurons of a brain, manages to keep the fly aloft and (for the most part) from crashing into anything. Nicolas Franceschini and his colleagues in France have been studying the tiny brains for 30 years, and their latest robot could provide some advancements to the navigation technology being used in robotic aircraft. The bot is a three ounce miniature helicopter with a 200 milligram electronic brain and a visual sensor that's pointed downward. The helicopter mimics the insect processing of visual cues to figure out how far above the ground it is and how fast it's going, and according to Franceschini "it never crashes." It's rather ironic to be planning to "upgrade"
UAVs with such minimal computing power in place of the pricey and computation-heavy instrumentation they currently carry, but the technology sounds promising all the same.
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posted February 12th 2007 10:29PM
and there was me hoping they'd strapped an actual insect brain inside a mini chopper
rasberries
i thought finally a direct hardware interface with an organic brain ..... :-(
This post is worthless without video.
just keep them away from florescent lights
looks bigger than the scale suggests too!
why not just train flys and strap a camera to them?
30 years of research and this is what he has to show for?