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Bug-eyed about new camera technology

bugeye camera

Eye, eye: A bee hovers above the digital camera inspired by insects' eyes.(Source: University of Illinois and Beckman Institute )

Bee's knees technology Taking their cue from nature, engineers have built a camera using stretchable electronics that scans the world like a fly's compound eye with a wide field of view and no distortion.

The digital device, which has a multitude of tiny, pliable lenses like those found in ant, beetle, and lobster eyes, also allows for a near-infinite depth of field and high motion sensitivity, the team behind the innovation writes in the journal Nature.

"We've figured out ways to make cameras that incorporate all of the essential design features of eyes found in the insect world," says study co-author Professor John Rogers of the University of Illinois.

"The result is a new type of camera that offers exceptionally wide-angle fields of view (nearly 180 degrees) with zero aberrations and uniform illumination intensity."

Most classical cameras mimic the working of the animal eye: light reflected off an object passes through the lens that bends and focuses the light on to the retina at the back of the organ, where nerve cells convert it into electric impulses sent to the brain, which produces an image.

These single-lens systems have a limited field of view, but insects and other species with eyes composed of multiple units called ommatidia enjoy panoramic vision.

"Nature has developed and refined these concepts over the course of billions of years of evolution," says Rogers.

Stretchable electronics

Conventional single, wide-angle camera lenses, like fish-eye lenses, distort images on the periphery because of a mismatch between the light entering through a bent lens surface only to be captured on a flat detector.

Most electronics used in detectors are made of a brittle silicon that cannot be bent.

For their camera, the team created stretchable electronics to build a detector that can be curved into the same hemispherical shape as the lens - eliminating distortion.

The camera, about 1.5 centimetres in diameter, has 180 miniature lenses, each with its own detector, similar to the number found in fire ant and bark beetle eyes.

Dragonflies have about 28,000 lenses and worker ants about 100.

The electronics and lenses are both flat when manufactured allowing them to be made with existing methods.

"This is the key to our technology," co-author Jianliang Xiao, electrical engineering assistant professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, says. "We can fabricate an electronic system that is compatible with current technology. Then we can scale it up."

The technology could be useful in surveillance cameras or endoscope imaging, says Rogers.

But commercialisation is some way off, as a useful camera would likely need millions of lens-detector combination units requiring much investment into manufacturing capacity.

In an accompanying commentary also published in Nature, Professor Alexander Borst and Dr Johannes Plett from the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology suggest the device has potential as a visual sensor for tiny aircraft called micro aerial vehicles (MAVs).

"Picture the following: a palm-sized MAV uses an artificial faceted eye to navigate autonomously through a collapsed building while other sensors on board scan the environment for smoke, radioactivity or even people trapped beneath rubble and debris," they write.

"Although these MAVs do not exist yet, thanks to devices such as that reported they should come within reach in the foreseeable future."

Tags: engineering, entomology, research, consumer-electronics