A recent study has successfully engineered fruit flies into controllable micro-robots, exploiting their agility and understanding of their biological systems. Conducted at Harvard's Rowland Institute, the research outlines methods where light and scent are used to guide the flies' movements, demonstrating how they can navigate environmental cues. Co-authors emphasize that these living entities can be regarded as robots, presenting a novel approach to robotics utilizing genetically modified organisms. This innovation could have broader implications for the field of robotics and bioengineering.
Typically, people think about robots as devices that you build with plastic and metal and the wires and software. But because fruit flies are so well understood, they can be treated as living robots.
We can rotate the light and wheel either clockwise or counterclockwise, and that makes the flies turn.
We get them to think that they are smelling something either to the left of their body or to the right of their body.
We can hack their genes to turn on actions, the same way that you would hack a conventional robotic system.
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