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Original Research ARTICLE

Remote radio control of insect flight

Hirotaka Sato¹*, Christopher W. Berry², Yoav Peeri¹, Emen Baghoomian¹, Brendan E. Casey², Gabriel Lavella¹, John M. VandenBrooks³, Jon F. Harrison³ and Michel M. Maharbiz^1,2

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

We demonstrated the remote control of insects in free flight via an implantable radio-equipped miniature neural stimulating system. The pronotum mounted system consisted of neural stimulators, muscular stimulators, a radio transceiver-equipped microcontroller and a microbattery. Flight initiation, cessation and elevation control were accomplished through neural stimulus of the brain which elicited, suppressed or modulated wing oscillation. Turns were triggered through the direct muscular stimulus of either of the basalar muscles. We characterized the response times, success rates, and free-flight trajectories elicited by our neural control systems in remotely controlled beetles. We believe this type of technology will open the door to in-flight perturbation and recording of insect flight responses.

Keywords:

neural stimulation, wireless remote radio control, micro and nano air vehicles (MAVs/NAVs), brain machine interface, cyborg beetle

Citation:

Sato H, Berry CW, Peeri Y, Baghoomian E, Casey BE, Lavella G, VandenBrooks JM, Harrison JF and Maharbiz MM (2009). Remote radio control of insect flight. Front. Integr. Neurosci. 3:24. doi: 10.3389/neuro.07.024.2009

Received:

18 June 2009;

Paper pending published:

24 August 2009;

Accepted:

09 September 2009;

Published online:

05 October 2009.

Edited by:

Rui M. Costa, Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Portugal

Reviewed by:

Ty Hedrick, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
Reid Harrison,The University of Utah, USA

© 2009 Sato, Berry, Peeri, Baghoomian, Casey, Lavella, VandenBrooks, Harrison, Maharbiz. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Hirotaka Sato, 407 Cory Hall, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-1776, USA. e-mail: hirosato@berkeley.edu