Pet robot with a simulated fly brain and Astra vision approaches its owner's cat
A robot bought on eBay runs a 166,700-neuron fruit fly brain simulation with Astra handling vision, and it approached the author's cat on its own for the first time.
UPDATE: Flyctor just approached my sleeping cat for the first time For anyone who missed the last post: Flyctor is a pet robot I bought on eBay, then gave a reconstructed fly brain and GPT-6 Astra vision. Inside him is MaleCNS - a live simulation of a fruit fly nervous system with 166,700 neurons and 25.6 million connections. Astra watches through Flyctor's camera. It recognizes the room, furniture, cables, doors, and now apparently: cats. Then it turns what it sees into simple sensory signals for the fly-brain simulation. The fly brain doesn't know what a cat is. It doesn't know what "sleeping" means. It just received a new, warm, moving object in the middle of the floor and decided it was worth investigating. So it slowly rolled over, stopped next to him, and stared. I did make one small mistake during the first test. I had the left/right avoidance mapping flipped. So whenever Flyctor detected an obstacle on the left, he confidently turned toward it instead. For a few minutes, his main survival strategy was driving directly into furniture. I fixed that. Now he avoids chairs, explores new objects, and has started treating my cat like the most interesting thing in the apartment. The bigger plan is to build more Flyctors. Each one will have a camera, a simulated fly brain, and its own little body moving through the real world. Then I want to put them online so people can send them commands from anywhere and watch what a digital insect nervous system does with them. Today Flyctor discovered my cat. I’m not sure which one of them is more confused.