Wide-eyed fruit fly - BBC

create a device that simulates the fruit fly eye. Artificial Eye has a panoramic view and is able to track all the movements in the environment in several different areas, but scientists had to sacrifice sharpness.

joint group of physicists from all over Europe reported in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences for they have created an artificial analogue mnogofasetochnogo eyes of Drosophila, have panoramic vision and able to fast track the movement in many directions at once.

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Compared with the eyes of vertebrates, having at least one lens, hundreds of lenses faceted eyes of fruit flies and other arthropods provide far less sharp images, but the insect can have a panoramic view with very little distortion and aberrations with high temporal resolution. According to Dario Floreano of the Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne (Switzerland), the main difficulty in creating an artificial copy mnogofasetochnogo eyes was to make a complete image by combining the data received from the many “facets”, which in insects are called ommatidia and are located on the curved surface. In addressing these challenges just Smarter Systems Laboratory, led by Dr. Floriano, was particularly strong, as the circle of her interests include artificial mini-systems that simulate natural and ensuring interaction between several such systems.

The result is a prototype of an artificial eye flies, consisting of 630 photodetectors, which provides an overview of 180 degrees and tracks changes in the “picture” with a frequency of 300 hertz.

other words, this “eye” twice as perfect Drosophila eye on the number of items (Fly’s Eye is a three hundred ommatidia) and runs three times faster (clock frequency in Drosophila – 100 Hz). However, before the eyes dragonfly with a few thousand ommatidia, this prototype, named CurvACE, not up.

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CurvACE is bent rectangular strip, the size of such a strip on each side – about a centimeter.

It is a substrate onto which the 42 vertical strips, each containing 15 ommatidia each. Structure – Three-layer. The upper layer consists of plastic lenses pasted on the glass stripes and vertical focusing the incoming light onto the lower surface of the glass, where the matrix of photodetectors arranged. In turn, these matrices are connected to a flexible substrate that is both a printed circuit board, is an electronic circuit that allowed to combine all the signals in a single picture.

angle of each linzochki – 4.3 degrees. In the horizontal plane is sufficient for 42 linzochek view of 180 degrees. In the vertical plane of the review, of course, is much narrower, and if you want to provide a panoramic view – that’s a question of technique. Moreover, and 180-degree horizontal view – is not the limit.

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enough to join the two already established CurvACE into one system, and the result is an eye with a 360 degrees.

According to Florian, applications have CurvACE can be set. Primarily, such an eye can be applied to transport Minisystem including flying and, in order to avoid collisions with obstacles and such systems currently in the same way as they avoid flies swarming in the air, just as they are the very last moment to dodge a fly swatter. In short, these eyes can come in handy whenever you want to track fast moving in the environment, and in general wherever needed “flexible” eye.