A silicon implementation of the fly's optomotor control system

Flies are capable of stabilizing their body during free night by using visu al motion information to estimate self-rotation. We have built a hardware m odel of this optomotor control system in a standard CMOS VLSI process. The result is a small, low-power chip that receives input directly from the rea l world through on-board photoreceptors and generates motor commands in rea l time. The chip was tested under closed-loop conditions typically used for insect studies. The silicon system exhibited stable control sufficiently a nalogous to the biological system to allow for quantitative comparisons.