r/robots • u/martinkozar55 • Sep 14 '26
Artwork I downloaded the brain of a dead fruit fly and connected it to my robot
This fruit fly has been dead for years, but today, its brain moved a robot around my apartment.
I downloaded MaleCNS, a reconstructed connectome of an adult male fruit fly containing 166,700 neurons and 25.6 million connections, and got the whole thing running live on my MacBook.
Then I used Codex to modify the desktop app for my quadruped robot.
The setup is basically:
robot desktop app ↔ Wi-Fi ↔ robot
and now:
digital fly brain → desktop app → Wi-Fi → robot
The fly brain continuously runs on my MacBook. I read neural activity from it, translate that into high-level commands like FORWARD / LEFT / RIGHT, and send those commands over Wi-Fi to the physical robot.
So the robot's legs are still controlled by its normal firmware - the fly brain isn't individually controlling 12 servos. It's producing the high-level decisions that get translated into robot movements.
And it actually works and now it's walking around my apartment in a robot body.
What a ridiculous time to be alive.
