A Silicon Implementation of the Fly's Optomotor Control System

  • Authors:
  • Reid R. Harrison;Christof R. Koch

  • Affiliations:
  • Computation and Neural Systems Program 139-74, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA;Computation and Neural Systems Program 139-74, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA

  • Venue:
  • Neural Computation
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Flies are capable of stabilizing their body during free flight by using visual motion information to estimate self-rotation. We have built a hardware model of this optomotor control system in a standard CMOS VLSI process. The result is a small, low-power chip that receives input directly from the real world through on-board photoreceptors and generates motor commands in real time. The chip was tested under closed-loop conditions typically used for insect studies. The silicon system exhibited stable control sufficiently analogous to the biological system to allow for quantitative comparisons.