A few weeks ago, I came across something interesting: Google and HHMI Janelia had mapped the entire brain of a fruit fly - around 166,700 neurons and 125 million connections.
As someone who works with computer vision, I wondered:
Could we use a real brain map to control something?
This isn’t really my field, but I found the idea interesting and decided to try it.
I built a virtual fly-like drone that sees through its camera and moves based on signals from the fly brain. I also created a live dashboard to visualize the brain, camera, and drone movements in real time.
Then I turned it into a small game: Can the fly find the apple? 🍎
The result: yes, it found it.
However, the system still needs help from FlyVis, a pre-trained brain model, plus my own processing and control logic. So the connectome alone is not enough yet.
Why is this interesting?
A fly’s brain uses very little energy, yet it can fly, avoid obstacles, and find food. Understanding how its brain works could help us build smaller, cheaper, and more energy-efficient robots and drones in the future.
I’m continuing the experiment and sharing what works, what doesn’t, and what I learn along the way.
More coming soon. 🚀
abbosaliboev
/
fly-brain-drone
A real 166,700-neuron fruit-fly connectome piloting a virtual drone to find food. Work in progress, honestly documented.
🧠🪰 Fly Brain Drone
We connected a real fruit-fly brain map to a virtual drone and asked it to find an apple.
166,700 real neurons. 125 million real synapses. One (very) hungry drone.
A real neuroscience dataset. A real physics engine. A real, honestly-reported mess of a research project — in public, as it happens.
An actual screenshot of the live dashboard — not a mockup. Left: the arena from outside. Center: what the drone itself sees. Top right: 47,261 real MaleCNS neuron positions with 27,523 visual-type neurons glowing by live activity. Bottom right: the hexagonal compound-eye input and motor/telemetry readout.
What is this?
In 2026, HHMI Janelia, Cambridge, and Google Research published the first complete connectome of an adult fly's central nervous system — every one of 166,700 neurons and ~125,000,000 synapses in a male Drosophila brain and nerve cord, mapped from real electron-microscope images.
We asked a simple…
Top comments (0)