FormulaFly

A simulated fruit fly learns to drive a Formula car.

Rendered from the project's own code. The MuJoCo fly walks its trackball to the throttle of a lap of the practice track, seen inset from the car's camera. Motion cells are coloured by direction. This lap is scripted; the fly learning to drive it is the work in progress.

The question behind it is whether a real brain's wiring helps a driver or only limits it. Each frame from the car's camera is resampled onto the 721 hexagonal lenses of a fly's eye and run through a model of its optic lobe, about 45,000 neurons wired from the FlyWire connectome (Codex), and the driver learns from the motion cells at the far end. It trains with reinforcement learning on a MuJoCo practice track built from Silverstone's centerline, with Assetto Corsa as the demo.

My part

My part is the body. Whatever the driver decides passes through a tethered fly in MuJoCo before it reaches the car: wingbeat asymmetry steers, and the legs walk a trackball whose spin is read back as the throttle. The wings reuse flybody's pretrained wingbeat generator, so all I add there is a small mapping from steering to wing bias. I'm now rigging it into the Assetto Corsa cockpit so the legs visibly work a fly-scale wheel.