title: A silicon implementation of the fly's optomotor control system.
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.
authors.affiliation: Computation and Neural Systems Program, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena 91125, USA.
authors.forename: R R
authors.initials: RR
authors.lastname: Harrison
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Koch
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003201:Computers; D004175:Diptera / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005426:Flight, Animal / Q000502:physiology; D017952:Ganglia, Invertebrate / Q000502:physiology; D009046:Motor Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D017956:Photoreceptor Cells, Invertebrate / Q000502:physiology; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012825:Silicon; D019415:Torque
chemical_list: D012825:Silicon