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This story is from the category Sensors
Date posted: 09/05/2008 Researchers from the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California, and the University of Wyoming have developed a fiber optic sensor inspired by the compound eye of the common housefly, Musca domestica. The new sensor can locate the edges and boundaries of objects more easily than traditional optic sensors. In a recent issue of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, researchers D. Riley, et al., describe how flies? vision systems are uniquely geared toward locating small objects with high precision. In fact, flies possess a visual precision beyond the resolution limit ? a property called hyperacuity. This feature is actually common to many animals, including humans. The researchers designed their sensor to mimic the fly?s overlapping photoreceptors and analog, parallel processing system. The sensor consists of a 1-mm-diameter ball lens that focuses light onto an array of photodetectors, where the field of view overlaps by about 70%. In experiments, the sensor could locate a 1-mm-wide string as the string moved across the field of vision at distances up to 200 mm from the lens, with minimal error. See the full Story via external site: www.physorg.com Most recent stories in this category (Sensors): 22/05/2013: New study finds blind people have the potential to u se their ‘inner bat’ to locate objects |
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