title: Miniature curved artificial compound eyes.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. dario.floreano@epfl.ch
authors.forename: Dario
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Floreano
authors.forename: Ramon
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Pericet-Camara
authors.forename: Stéphane
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Viollet
authors.forename: Franck
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ruffier
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Brückner
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Leitel
authors.forename: Wolfgang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Buss
authors.forename: Mohsine
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Menouni
authors.forename: Fabien
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Expert
authors.forename: Raphaël
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Juston
authors.forename: Michal Karol
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Dobrzynski
authors.forename: Geraud
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: L'Eplattenier
authors.forename: Fabian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Recktenwald
authors.forename: Hanspeter A
authors.initials: HA
authors.lastname: Mallot
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Franceschini
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D032701:Biomimetics / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D054910:Compound Eye, Arthropod / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D008953:Models, Anatomic; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology; D012371:Robotics / Q000379:methods*; D058615:Synthetic Biology / Q000379:methods*
keywords: Micro-opto-electromechanical systems; bioinspired robotics; optic flow sensor; wide-angle vision