Artificial Bee Eye Could Improve Robotic Vision [Science]

Miniature robotic aircraft could soon have insect-like eyes to head with their insect-like wings. Neurobiologists have developed an artificial bee eye, with a 280-degree visual field, which should enable robots to look more of the realm around them.

Wolfgang Stürzl and associates at Bielefeld University in Germany wanted to capture as wide-angled a view of the arena as possible using a single camera, as a way to minimise the burden of robotic aircraft. To try this, the team used a so-called catadioptric imaging system, which captures an image using both mirrors and lenses.

In their set-up, a dome-shaped mirror, with a lens at its centre, was placed 20 millimetres in front of the camera\’s charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor chip, with its convex surface facing towards the camera. The lens focuses light from in front of the camera onto the CCD to create an image with a 110-degree field of view. Even as, the convex face of the mirror captures a reflection of the realm behind the camera and focuses this light onto the CCD, widening the sector of view to 280 degrees.

A computer algorithm stitches the two sets of images together, creating a composite image that looks like it was captured through a fisheye lens. The small computer on board the robotic aircraft ought to be in a position to perform this stitching job fast enough to run at 25 frames per second, say the team.

Finally, to represent 280 degrees of knowledge as a 2D image, the composite image passes through a system that mimics different thousand hexagonal facets of the honeybee\’s compound eyes. This reduces the resolution of the image, but makes it easier for whoever is controlling the robot to interpret the extremely wide-angled view of the area.

Hod Lipson, a roboticist at Cornell University in Ithaca, Long island, says the honeybee lens is a \” great contribution to robotics and especially to micro air vehicles where wide field vision systems should be packed into an extremely compact space\” . He says that the vision system is one of several aspects of insect morphology, physiology and behaviour that may be mimicked in robotics. Others include insects\’ flight stability, their resilience to various environmental conditions, and extreme power efficiency.

Journal reference: Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, DOI: 10.1088/1748-3182/5/3/036002.

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