Fly-O-Rama!

That question led him to build not just Robofly-which is 100 times larger and 1,000 times slower than a fruit fly-but a growing family of strange and wonderful machines with names like Bride of Robofly, Fly-o-rama, and the Rock-and-Roll Fly Arena, all designed to help reveal the secrets of insect flight. The answers that Dickinson, whose e-mail handle is "flyman," gleans from those devices might someday enable engineers to build automated craft the size of rice grains that explore other planets, fly into burning buildings to search for victims, or spy on military opponents-literally, a fly on the wall. "He's got a great engineer underneath that biologist exterior," says Ronald Fearing, a Berkeley electrical engineer who has collaborated with Dickinson on building robotic flying devices.




Last year, Dickinson's research earned him a MacArthur "genius" fellowship, a grant of $500,000 over five years, with no strings attached. MacArthur fellows are selected for their exceptional creativity, and for track records that promise important future advances. Dickinson was one of the last fellows to learn about his award. He had been backpacking with his fiancee in Hawaii, 18 miles into a Kauai forest. When he returned to civilization, he checked his voicemail and found frantic messages to call his lab, but his cellphone conked out in the rain before he could return any calls. He finally found a pay phone at a state forest where he had gone to watch fruit flies swarming in guava trees.




Dickinson is a small 39-year-old who wears glasses and sometimes sports a beard thick enough to pass for a mountain man on his frequent hiking trips. He was introduced to flies in the mid-1980s, when he was at the University of Washington getting his Ph.D. in neurobiology. Fruit flies are the guinea pig of this field, because they have only about 500,000 neurons-compared with 100 billion in a human brain. A fly uses most of those neurons to gather sensory information, including light with its eyes, smells with odor-sensitive hairs, and balance with club-shaped gyroscopes behind the wings. Those signals get funneled through the nervous system, which then sends commands to the wings. The commands have to be simple yet exquisitely precise, because the time between wing beats is only a few thousandths of a second.




As a graduate student, Dickinson studied the natural strain gauges on flies' wings that help them sense how much their wings are bending. But along the way, something began to bother him. "How can I understand what the sensors on a fly wing are used for if I don't understand the forces a wing encounters?" he wondered.