Artificial Compound Eye Inspired by Fruit Flies

Innovation: Industry

CURVACE

Image: Rob Pumphrey / Unsplash / CC BY SA - Creative Commons Attribution + ShareAlike

Sense Light (Visible Spectrum) From the Environment

Living systems constantly receive signals from their environment that help them survive. Light (in the visible spectrum) can come from other living systems (such as fireflies) or from non-living sources (such as the sun). Survival often depends on sensing and responding to challenges like low light conditions or light that has been altered in some way. Because basic survival is at stake, living systems must excel at meeting those challenges. A well-known phenomenon is how water bends light. A stork trying to catch a fish underwater can compensate for this bending effect so that when it strikes at the fish, it has a good chance of catching it.

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Sense Motion

Perceiving motion is important for a living system to sense where it is in relation to a moving environment, which is critical in locating resources or wayfinding. This applies whether the environment itself is in motion (such as water movement coming from a nearby fish) or the living system is moving within a stationary environment (such as a bird flying through the air). Because motion dampens over distance and the cost of missing those motion signals is high, living systems must be quite sensitive to these signals. For example, fast-flying big brown bats have microscopic, stiff, domed hairs on their wing membranes that act as a sensor array to monitor flight speed and airflow conditions.

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Differentiate Signal From Noise

The environment surrounding any living system is full of signals, such as smells, sounds, electricity, magnetism, and more. Too many signals at once can be overwhelming, making it difficult to locate and react to any particular signal. To address this, living systems must differentiate among all signals, or “noise,” so they can focus on those they really need. During mating season, for example, male frogs gather close together in large groups to call for females. Despite their overwhelming, collective noise, females are able to find a particular male whose call is attractive to her. This is because the males use desynchronized calling, enabling individual recognition.

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Transduce/Convert Signals

Sometimes a signal, such as sound or vibration, reaches a living system and needs to be converted into a different, usable form. This requires converting from one type of energy form to another. For example, organisms with eyes have photoreceptors at the back of the eyes that convert light into electrical pulses. These pulses travel to the brain and allows it to register color, shape, and detail.

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Brochures

Patents

WO2011039062A1
714.5 KB PDF

CURVACE is a curved artificial compound eye that allows for rapid and accurate motion detection over a large area.

Benefits

Improved motion detection
Increased visibility over a wider field of view

Applications

Robotics
Cameras

UN Sustainable Development Goals Addressed

Goal 9: Industry Innovation & Infrastructure

The Challenge

Artificial compound eyes are beneficial for robotics and other applications that require a camera-like apparatus. However, creating an artificial eye is difficult because it requires aligning different photoreceptive and optical components onto a curved surface.

Innovation Details

CURVACE (Curved Artificial Compound Eye) was inspired by the eyes of fruit flies. It consists of three planar layers of separately produced arrays: a microlens, a neuromorphic photodetector, and a flexible printed circuit board. These three layers are stacked, cut, and curved to produce a mechanically flexible imager. This produces a panoramic, undistorted field of view with embedded and programmable low-power signal processing, high temporal resolution, and local to illumination in a very thin package.

Curved Artificial Compound Eye. (A) Image of the CURVACE prototype. The entire device occupies a volume of 2.2 cm3, weighs 1.75 g, and consumes 0.9 W at maximum power. (B) Illustration of the panoramic field of view (FOV) of the fabricated prototype. The dots and circles represent the angular orientation and acceptance angle of every ommatidium, respectively.

Biological Model

Insects have compound eyes that consist of a curved array of micro-lenses, each conveying photons to a separate set of one or more photoreceptors. Although it has lower resolution compared to vertebrate eyes, compound eyes are efficient for motion detection over a large field of view, making it an excellent sensor for accurate and fast navigation in 3D dynamic environments.

See Related Strategy on Insect Eyes

close up photograph of fly with red eyes

Biological Strategy

Compound Eyes Are Anti-Fogging Surfaces

Compound eyes on the mosquito are anti-fogging surfaces due to small hierarchical structures that create an air barrier.

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