My TEDx talk just came out!
“How flies can help us build better robots and AI”
youtube.com/watch?v=kFV6...
Thanks again to the fantastic organizers at TEDxArendal
Special thanks to the people in my laboratory at EPFL past and present without whom none of this would be possible
https://youtube.com/watch?v=kFV6NC-jIK0
3-2/ EVEN without antennae, the coordination between head rotations and foreleg movements remains! 😱😱😱
3-1/ Or, head-immobilized flies will still move their antennae and forelegs in a fascinatingly coordinated fashion. 🤯
3/ Surprisingly, each body part operates independently of the others' sensory feedback. Even with amputated forelegs, flies still move their antennae and head! This suggests an open-loop (not feedback-based) coordination mechanism. 🤖
10/ Big thanks to our amazing collaborators and the incredible fly community for creating the open-source tools that made this work possible. 🙌
#Neuroscience #MotorControl #Drosophila #Connectome @neuroxepfl.bsky.social @fly-eds.bsky.social @flywire.bsky.social9/ So next time you see a fly grooming itself or you try multitasking, take a moment to appreciate the magic of coordination. Check out our preprint! 🪰🧠
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Centralized brain networks underlie body part coordination during grooming
Animals must coordinate multiple body parts to perform important tasks such as grooming, or locomotion. How this movement synchronization is achieved by the nervous system remains largely unknown. Her...
8/ The fly’s strategy enables robustness yet flexibility, thus it may be a common blueprint for movement across species—or even for other behaviors in flies. 🐁🐱🦎
7/ Recurrent excitation: Drives non-groomed antennal pitch movements and keeps other motor networks in sync. ⚡️
Broadcast inhibition: Suppresses targeted antennal movement to prevent conflicting actions. ⛔️
6/ To understand this better, we simulated the grooming network and ran a computational neural activation screen. Two key circuit motifs emerged as the stars of this coordination process:
5/ Think of it as an elegant engineering solution: these central neurons enable flexibility, allowing any brain region to initiate or stop the behavior. 🛠️
Here, once again, we were granted unprecedented access to neural architectures by having the full fly brain connectome at our fingertips...
4/ So, what orchestrates these movements? Using the fly connectome, we constructed a subnetwork for antennal grooming. In this network, we discovered that a central group of neurons links motor circuits for the neck, antennae, and forelegs. 🧠 These neurons act as a hub for coordinating body parts.
ghost grooming! (perhaps more appropriate for halloween 👻)
3-2/ EVEN without antennae, the coordination between head rotations and foreleg movements remains! 😱😱😱
This is really a beautiful demonstration of one of the important opportunities provided by realistic biomechanical models - inference of contact forces and selective manipulation of individual joint degrees of freedom!
2/ By simulating these motions in a biomechanical model, we discovered the reason: synchronization ensures forceful and unobstructed interactions between the forelegs and antennae. This efficiency guarantees a thorough cleaning job. 💪✨
2/ By simulating these motions in a biomechanical model, we discovered the reason: synchronization ensures forceful and unobstructed interactions between the forelegs and antennae. This efficiency guarantees a thorough cleaning job. 💪✨
1/ In our study, we explored how flies synchronize their head, antennae, and forelegs during goal-directed antennal grooming. We found that when targeting an antenna, flies perform three distinct motor actions. But why these specific movements?
🧵 Ever seen a fly perform a full self-care ritual? 🪰 They meticulously rub their head and clean their antennae, ensuring every speck of dirt is gone. But how do they coordinate all those tiny body parts so seamlessly?👇
