Reverse-engineering lift control in fruit flies

Fruit flies represent an important model system to study sensorimotor pathways. In this paper, we describe a quantitative reverse-engineering approach to study lift control in fruit flies. Flies were tethered to a MEMS micro force sensor and their forces measured while stimulated with moving patterns. Their wing motions were simultaneously measured with a custom designed high speed vision system. We characterized the fliespsila response to vertically-oscillating patterns in a Bode diagram and fit a transfer function to the frequency response data. The frequency response characteristics are compared to those of other artificial and natural lift controllers. This work shows how engineering can provide both strong technical tools and an analytical framework to explain biological sensorimotor pathways, a task that is highly relevant to the design of artificial devices at similar dynamic scales.