A fruit-fly brain plus Astra vision powers a robot that wanders an apartment
A robot uses the MaleCNS fruit-fly neural simulation to pick directions and Astra to read its camera feed and recognize furniture, roaming the apartment without remote control or a preset route.
I put a fly brain and ChatGPT Astra inside a robot that now roams around my apartment It feels a little like building WALL-E, except WALL-E's brain is a reconstructed fruit fly nervous system. The fly brain is MaleCNS - 166,700 neurons and 25.6 million connections, running as a live simulation. Astra is the robot's eyes. It watches the camera feed, recognizes walls, furniture, doors, and objects on the floor, then translates the scene into simple sensory signals the fly-brain simulation can react to. The fly brain is the part that decides where to go next. Astra sees the room. The fly brain chooses a direction. The robot moves. No remote control. No prerecorded route. Just a tiny robot wandering around my apartment with ChatGPT vision and the nervous system of an insect. Right now it mostly rolls between my desk and the kitchen like it has somewhere important to be. The weird part is watching it stop in front of a chair. Astra knows it's a chair. The fly brain has no idea what a chair is. But somehow, together, they decided not to crash into it.