§ BEHAVIORS

Walking is solved — but it is solved open-loop, the same rhythm played every step regardless of the body. Goal-directed, sensorimotor behavior needs more: the controller has to turn what it senses into what it does. That means closing the sensory loop — the shared prerequisite, now done, for every behavior below.

A closed loop writes body state — joint angles, foot contacts — back into the grid each control step, so the rule can react to what is actually happening instead of replaying a fixed motor program. That is the closed proprioceptive loop established on the Sensing tab and in the system diagram— now solid and live. Each behavior below builds on it.

§ HOW THEY CONNECT

Not four separate projects — one closed loop with four payoffs. Each behavior is that same loop plus one new sense and a reward. Escape is the bridge: it maps onto a real, mapped circuit and plugs into the connectome brain on the Embodied page.

§ THE BEHAVIORS

Four behaviors, each a closed-loop demo: a new sense, a reward, and the fly learning to use one to earn the other. Escape leads — it's the one that maps onto a real, mapped circuit, and that circuit is now wired into the embodied loop (the Embodied tab). Perturbation and chemotaxis are the other live ones; navigation — the seek-plus-avoid synthesis, and the one behavior without a clean real-circuit seam — is exploratory.

• Escape responselivesenselooming detector — angular size + expansion, bilateralrewardreact fast + flee in the correct directionthe connectome bridge — maps onto a real, mapped circuit (LC4 / LPLC2 → the Giant Fiber), and that circuit is now wired into the embodied loop → Embodied.
• Perturbation / robustnesslivesenseproprioception — joint angles + foot contactsrewardhold heading after a shove (course correction)the cleanest proof that feedback matters — a stark open-vs-closed A/B, and the cheapest to run.
• Chemotaxis / foraginglivesensebilateral odor / taste gradient (L − R antenna)rewardreduce distance to / reach the sourcethe most ‘alive’ story — emergent steering out of a sensor asymmetry; mirrors Eon's foraging.
• Obstacle navigationexploratorysenseshort-range distance ‘feelers’ + goal bearingrewardreach the goal, penalize collisionsfuses seek + avoid — the most robot-demo-compelling of the four, and the one honest about having no clean real-circuit seam.

The science ledger behind this sequence — every behavior, the escape circuit, the compute envelope — is the project's research roadmap; the math is in the appendix.