Sunday, February 8, 2009

Fly car racer

pXor and myself decided we have to do some cool bio-hack, to be rightfully called biology geeks. And since we work on flies (fruit fly - Drosophila melanogaster), we wanted to make a flyBorg :) which we envision to be a supercomputer made of a lot of fly brains interconnected. Well, that's too much wishful thinking and beyond our current capabilities :(

We decided to simplify the job, into a more tangible thing, but which still uses the fly's intelligence in object identification. So, the objective is this: The fly (after training) should sit on a toy car. The car has steering controls. No accelerator/brakes. Certain motion cues like a tug of a leg, can be used as a signal to steer. The 'road' will have two lines marking either sides, within which it has to stay throughout. It should be a curved road. It has to learn to drive on any arbit (yet manouverably easily possible) curved road.

Here's the plan: Using operant conditioning (fancy term for an associative memory that maps an action, to consequences of the action) to associate going-out-of-bounds, to an electric shock. An electric shock should be able to be easily paired with a location sense or direction sense, as it makes biological sense. But, the only problem seems to be in teaching it to steer. Left middle leg tug, steers left and right leg steers right is what we plan to achieve. But not exactly clear on how we should train this. (Middle leg in particular, as the fly keeps cleaning itself all the time with its front pair or rear pair of legs.)

Well, this just uses a wild-type fly. We are wondering if some genetic tweaking using stuff like the GAl4/UAS system and/or Chanelopsin would help to work ends out. Might be, not in this expt, but with some more complications added :) (How can u not use such cool tools when u have 'em!)

This is how u do the DARPA challenge(albeit, a much dumbed down version) without a single line of code ;)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-0eZytv6Qk

Bet u could beat this in no time ;-)