8 April 2000

Locusts Watch Star Wars To Create Robot Vision

by Kate Melville



Dr Rind worked in collaboration with Mark Blanchard and Paul Verschure, of the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich, to model the locust's eyes and neurones as the basis of a collision avoidance system for a small, three-wheeled robot. When put into an arena of towers made from Lego bricks and set in motion, the robot avoided collisions 91% of the time, even though it had a short time to react.

Dr Rind, of Newcastle University's Department of Neurobiology, said that in the locust visual system there are several fan-shaped neurons concerned with motion in depth, known as the Lobula Giant Movement Detectors (LGMDs).

She also found that locusts distinguish between approaching and receding objects from the way in which edges of an object's image grow and move over each compound eye. The robot's visual system consists of a four-layered neural network incorporating the general features of a locust eye, including the input organisation of the locust's LGMD system.

The robot has a camera with of low resolution, which closely imitates the locust's grainy vision. Signals from the camera are processed by a neural network to provide 'edge detection' before reaching the robot's movement etector, which is designed to respond in the same way as a locust's. Nigel Clarke, principal engineer at the car company Jaguar's radar applications research unit in Coventry, has been keeping a close eye on Rind's progress.