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Back in January we heard about Draper\u2019s efforts to outfit a living dragonfly with a sort of solar-powered mind control backpack<\/a>. This project, known as DragonflEye, is cruising right along, and the R&D firm just released a video of the modified insect taking flight.<\/p>\n The idea is to control a living insect\u2019s flight remotely, but without clumsily activating its wings artificially (the subtlety of those movements are beyond us) or merely giving the insect the idea of going in a certain direction (it can learn to ignore these notions).<\/p>\n To do so, the Draper team relied on what\u2019s called optogenetics, infusing certain parts of the insect\u2019s anatomy with light-sensitive materials that both produce and respond to light in a certain wavelength (more details in my original article<\/a>). It\u2019s not a simple undertaking, as the project\u2019s senior researcher, Joe Register, explained in an email to TechCrunch.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>\u201cLast year we focused on developing core enabling technologies like the backpack, optrode, and synthetic biology toolkit for the dragonfly,\u201d Register said. \u201cNow that we are in our second year, we have equipped dragonflies with our first-generation backpacks in a motion capture room that can monitor their precise flight movements as data is captured from navigation system. This has allowed us to develop precise onboard tracking algorithms for autonomous navigation.\u201d<\/p>\n