There's a link to https://spectrum.ieee.org/fruit-flies , which links to a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXL3BBZQtgA , which describes their instrumentation setup.'Video Games' Shed Light on How Flies Fly
California Institute of Technology researchers developed a neural network that predicts the wing motion of fruit flies based on muscle activity, in order to better understand the wing's complex hinge structure. This involved creating a "video game" for the flies, surrounding them with LED displays that simulated environmental cues and prompted them to change their flight patterns and speeds. The researchers collected terabytes of data on 72,000 wingbeats.
Quick summary from closed captioning in the middle of the video:
All this is happening inside a sort of fruitfly-sized stadium whose walls are covered with thousands of LEDs that can produce dynamic visual patterns to prompt the fly to maneuver in various ways, so the researchers can collect data to correlate muscle activity with wing motion with flight dynamics.We basically built a setup that can simultaneously image the activity of the steering muscles using genetically modified flies which fluoresce when their muscle flexes, and we can pick that up with a microscope. The other technique we combined that with was high-speed videography. So we have three of the high-speed video cameras operating at 15,000 frames per second capturing the full three-dimensional motion of the wing.
Interesting work!
--Rik
