Rowland Fellow Sasha Rayshubskiy and his team have turned ordinary fruit flies into remarkably controllable “micro-robots.” – without a single gear or circuit board in sight. Rather than building tiny robots from scratch, the team takes advantage of a fruit fly’s built-in reflexes. Their new study, published in PNAS, and featured on the technology news site Ars Technica, shows how genetic tweaks and carefully designed visual or scent-based cues can direct swarms of flies to walk specific routes – even “writing” words on the floor – and haul objects nearly their own weight. The work challenges the idea that a robot must be built entirely from metal and wires, offering instead a biological model that leverages the fly’s natural agility.
“Fruit flies have evolved for millions of years to handle tight spaces and unpredictable environments,” says lead author Sasha Rayshubskiy, Research Group Leader and Rowland Fellow, Harvard University. “By tapping into those innate navigational reflexes, we can guide them very precisely – turning them into living machines. We want people to see that ‘robotics’ can be more than conventional hardware.”
“In many ways, these insects already have the advanced ‘software’ we need,” adds co-author Charles Neuhauser, Research Associate, Harvard University. “They bring reflexes and adaptability that traditional robots would need painstaking code to achieve.”
While it may be some time before you see swarms of flies performing micro-scale chores in the wild, the team’s vision doesn’t stop at the lab door. They’re exploring designs for mini “backpacks” that could deliver real-time guidance signals – eliminating the need for external cameras or projectors – and further blurring the line between biology and robotics. “Because fruit flies make their own decisions in response to our signals, we get a fascinating combination of guidance and natural behavior,” explains co-author Kenichi Iwasaki, Research Scientist, Harvard University. “They’ll follow our cues, but they also bring their own instincts and agility to the task, which you’d never see in a standard robot.”
Image caption: Fruit flies write ‘Hello World’, with their walking path – marking a new frontier in biological micro-robotics. Credit: Aleksandr Rayshubskiy.