CurvACE : A miniature curved artificial compound eye
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1
AMU/CNRS, Biorobotics, France
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2
Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering, Germany
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3
Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Germany
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4
EPFL, Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, Switzerland
In most animal species, vision is mediated by compound eyes, which offer lower resolution than vertebrate single-lens eyes, but significantly larger fields of view with negligible distortion and spherical aberration, as well as high temporal resolution in a tiny package. Compound eyes are ideally suited for fast panoramic motion perception. Engineering a miniature artificial compound eye is challenging because it requires accurate alignment of photoreceptive and optical components on a curved surface. Here, we describe a unique design method for biomimetic compound eyes featuring a panoramic, undistorted field of view in a very thin package. The design consists of three planar layers of separately produced arrays, namely, a microlens array, a neuromorphic photodetector array, and a flexible printed circuit board that are stacked, cut, and curved to produce a mechanically flexible imager. Following this method, we have prototyped and characterized an artificial compound eye bearing a hemispherical field of view with embedded and programmable low-power signal processing, high temporal resolution, and local adaptation to illumination. The prototyped artificial compound eye possesses several characteristics similar to the eye of the fruit fly Drosophila and other arthropod species. This design method opens up additional vistas for a broad range of applications in which wide field motion detection is at a premium, such as collision-free navigation of terrestrial and aerospace vehicles, and for the experimental testing of insect vision theories.
Acknowledgements
The CURVACE project acknowledges the financial support of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) program within the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission, under FET-Open Grant 237940.
References
D. Floreano, et al. (2013) Miniature Curved Artificial Compound Eyes, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1219068110.
Keywords:
Compound optics,
insect vision,
Panoramic eye,
Optic Flow,
Auto-adaptive pixels,
Bendable electronics,
Curved sensors,
Flexible sensors,
Motion sensing
Conference:
International Conference on Invertebrate Vision, Fjälkinge, Sweden, 1 Aug - 8 Aug, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Oral presentation preferred
Topic:
Eye design, optics and spatial vision
Citation:
Viollet
S,
Ruffier
F,
Leitel
R,
Mallot
HA and
Floreano
D
(2019). CurvACE : A miniature curved artificial compound eye.
Front. Physiol.
Conference Abstract:
International Conference on Invertebrate Vision.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fphys.2013.25.00116
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Received:
27 May 2013;
Published Online:
09 Dec 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Stéphane Viollet, AMU/CNRS, Biorobotics, Marseille, 13288, France, stephane.viollet@univ-amu.fr