Flywalk - Developing interactive systems to understand nature

This is a success story in which I have worked together with my friend Markus Knaden, from the Max Planck Institute Jena, that has now been published in Nature Scientific Reports. The start of this work goes back to when I was at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, in Zurich, and I was working on my PhD thesis entitled "The principles of insect navigation applied to flying and roving robots". The goal was to bring together ethology (the study of animal behavior), neuroscience (the study of the nervous system) and robotics to develop biologically-based or biomimetic insect-like robots.

In the context of this thesis is that I started the development of the AnTS tracking system and my interest in quantifying animal behavior in order to develop insect like robots. This led to a very interesting collaboration with Ruediger Wehner's group in which we jointly developed a number of interesting fully tracked experimental paradigms to study rule learning and landmark navigation in formica ants.    

Markus eventually moved to Bill Hansson's group in Jena and I did so to Bacelona, and later to Funchal. This time the interests shifted towards olfaction and flying insects. This is how we came to develop the Flywalk, an interactive arena for the experimentation of odor related behavioral responses in flies. This is a very innovative system that allows continuous unsupervised experimentation with flies to quantify their behavioral responses to odors (appetitive vs. aversive) and their sensitivity to them. This is a closed loop system that using red retro-illumination (light not visible to flies) tracks 15 flies in separate parallel wind tunnels (of about a 1cm of diameter) while delivering controlled odor stimuli. In a 2 hour experiment you can screen and collect large amounts of data (approx. 15 x 240 odor combinations).

If you are interested in this work, additional information can be found in this paper:

A high-throughput behavioral paradigm for Drosophilaolfaction - The Flywalk. Kathrin Steck, Daniel Veit, Ronald Grandy, Sergi Bermdez i Badia, Zenon Mathews, Paul Verschure, Bill S. Hansson & Markus Knaden. Nature Scientific Reports 2, Article number: 361 doi:10.1038/srep00361