The praying mantis is one of the few insects with compound eyes and the ability to perceive 3D space. Engineers are replicating their visual systems to make machines see better.
Self-driving cars occasionally crash because their visual systems can't always process static or slow-moving objects in 3D space. In that regard, they're like the monocular vision of many insects, whose compound eyes provide great motion-tracking and a wide field of view but poor depth perception.A praying mantis' field of view also overlaps between its left and right eyes, creating binocular vision with depth perception in 3D space.
"Making the sensor in hemispherical geometry while maintaining its functionality is a state-of-the-art achievement, providing a wide field of view and superior depth perception," Bae said. Bae, whose adviser is Kyusang Lee, an associate professor in the department with a secondary appointment in materials science and engineering, is first author of the team's recent paper inAmong the team's important findings on the lab's prototype system was a potential reduction in power consumption by more than 400 times compared to traditional visual systems.
The approach mirrors how insects perceive the world through visual cues, differentiating pixels between scenes to understand motion and spatial data. For example, like other insects -- and humans, too -- the praying mantis can process visual data rapidly by using the phenomenon of motion parallax, in which nearer objects appear to move faster than distant objects. Only one eye is needed to achieve the effect, but motion parallax alone isn't sufficient for accurate depth perception.
"Our team's work represents a significant scientific insight that could inspire other engineers and scientists by demonstrating a clever, biomimetic solution to complex visual processing challenges," he said.Chicago
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