Francesco Crivelli
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We are in the process of reverse engineering vision based flight speed control in the fruit fly Drosophila Melanogaster. We will then test the identified control strategies on a quad-rotor helicopter in the Flying Machine Arena (FMA, www.flyingmachinearena.org), a large airspace equipped with a camera tracking system allowing off-board real-time flight control of up to a dozen unmanned vehicles. The goal of this project is to design and implement a framework allowing interfacing the FMA with the fly-derived speed controller. At the beginning the FMA will take full control of the quad-rotor's flight relying on the tracking system and allow only a few aspects of flight to be controlled using the identified biological strategies. The fly-derived controllers will then gradually take charge of the quad-rotor while the FMA will be used for low level control and as a virtual safety net in the case of upcoming crashes. The fruit fly sensory inputs (visual and mechanosensory) will first be emulated using the FMA data and in the future substituted with real on-board sensors.