A silicon implementation of the fly's optomotor control system
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Updated: Oct 9, 2026

Operant Learning of Drosophila at the Torque Meter
Published on: June 16, 2008
1Computation and Neural Systems Program, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena 91125, USA.
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.
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