Robot Vision Mimics Flight Simulator

Robovision is still an extremely clunky field, with wary humans having to wear identifying tags or just keep out of any area robots are working in.  These strategies are a little too similar to "being enslaved by electronic overlords" to be comfortable, so scientists are looking at an insectoid sources for improved eyesight.  To this end they've built a flight simulator for flies.  Yes, you read that right.

Flies are known to "see" far faster than we do, with up to four times as many frames per second as the human eye.  More important is the mind behind the sight - or rather, the lack of one.  Flies have far too few neurons to process such visual information the way we do, meaning they've evolved a far faster "hardwired" approach to optical input using fewer components, a fixed visual field (insect eyes don't swivel), and accelerated reactions based on sacrificing conceptual information for reactive ability - which is exactly what we want robots to have.

After all, why bother building our own system when we can copy another creature's work?  If another species spent a few million years working it out, there's no need for us reinvent the evolutionary optical wheel.  That's the thinking of the futuristicaly-named Cognition for Technical Systems group, CoTeSys, who've built a flight simulator to read the program out of a blowflies brain.  The insect is harnessed in the center of a 360-degree screen with electrodes reading reactions from its neurons.  As the sights around it change, the equipment detail the reactions - allowing the scientists to eventually map the entire program and reconstruct it elsewhere.

They'll then try to simulate the insect shortcuts in visual processing instead of the extremely slow multi-step procedure of scanning, processing, and deciding that computers currently use.  But don't worry: we're sure this will work far better than previous sciences crossed with flies that you may have heard of, or watched major motion picture horror movies based on.

Luke McKinney

Insect vision http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/07/31/robotics.insights.through.flies.eyes

Comments

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this was covered by a show on TV show called "Weird Connections" or something with a title like "The dragonfly that watched star wars" here it is: (best science research show I have EVER scene but far too expensive here)

http://store.discoveryeducation.com/product/search?Brand=&Grade=&page=3&terms=weird+connections

One scientist hooked up dragonflies and played the stars wars movie space fighter scenes in front of them and judged their reactions. The flies reacted most when an image grew bigger on the screen.

Another scientist read about the study and determined that that image scaling was the trigger to help flies avoid collisions. That's this one they are talking about withthe little computer screens.

Another scientist read about that study and they built a small hand sized uav that flies around inside a room avoiding collisions with that "getting larger is bad" algorithm