A team of engineers and roboticists at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has developed cameras inspired by the eyes of insects.
The design enables a very wide frame of view, without expensive lenses, which could potentially provide cheap, simple, and lightweight visual sensors for navigation in robots and driverless cars.
Insects like dragonflies have pairs of eyes made up from around 30,000 visual units called ommatidia, that provide a 360-degree field of vision, helping them to avoid and evade predators. Ommatidia are essentially tubes with a simple lens at one end and a basic photoreceptor at the other, and large bundles of these give them pixel-like vision.
In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, Zhou et al explain that “previous attempts that transferred a micro lens array onto a curved surface have suffered from complications during the transfer process.”
In an alternative approach, the team developed a lens-free compound eye by combining a 3D-printed hemispherical pinhole structure with a perovskite, a crystal material, nanowire photodetector array. The artificial eye can generate images with a field of view of 140 degrees, and an overlapping pair can extend this to 220 degrees.
The pinhole design allowed for a wide field of view and could accurately locate targets, and successfully track a moving quadruped robot in real time, while the eye was incorporated into a drone.
One member of the team, Zhiyong Fan, said this could be a huge advancement in certain robotics applications including a swarm of drones flying in close formation.
He said: “They need to maintain a distance, maybe a few metres away from each other, so they need to know the precise location and the relative speed they are approaching each other and moving away from each other,” he says. “So the compound eye is important; it has the wider field of view and also sensitivity for motion.”
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