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

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.social

9/ 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...

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...

ghost grooming! (perhaps more appropriate for halloween 👻)

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. 💪✨

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?👇

As you unwrap your holiday presents, consider how you coordinate your fingers and limbs. @gzmozd.bsky.social identified fly brain networks for body part coordination through experiments, biomechanical modeling, connectomics, and neural network simulations ! 🤖 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Being raised alone makes flies afraid of one another! 🪰 But exposure to other flies makes them become sociable. We found and recorded specific learning circuits in the brain that regulate this transition. Read more in our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Now published in Nature Methods: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We're excited to present NeuroMechFly v2, a neuromechanical simulation of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, for exploring artificial neural networks (including connectome-driven models) controlling behavior. www.neuromechfly.org

The EPFL School of Life Sciences is hiring in the very broad area of Life Science Engineering. www.epfl.ch/about/workin... This a topically highly broad search. A rare opportunity. Come be my colleague!

We're excited to present "NeuroMechFly 2.0, a framework for simulating embodied sensorimotor control in adult Drosophila" biorxiv.org/content/10.1... In which we make our digital fly see, smell, adhere, and navigate challenging terrain

Cross posting a new paper from the lab "Networks of descending neurons transform command-like signals into population-based behavioral control" x.com/jonasfbraun/...