Artificial bee eye could improve visual navigation in mobile robots

Washington, Aug 7 (ANI): Scientists have created an imaging system that mimics a honeybee's field of view.

The lightweight system could change the way we build mobile robots and small flying vehicles.

The artificial bee eye is complete with fully functional camera, to shed light on the insects' complex sensing, processing and navigational skills.

It has a mirror-lens combination attached to a USB video camera that allowed the researchers to take unique images showing the world from an insect's viewpoint.

Their next step is to incorporate colour recognition, which is important to honeybees for flower recognition and discrimination and also polarisation vision, which bees use for orientation.

"Despite the discussed limitations of our model of the spatial resolution of the honeybees compound eyes, we are confident that it is useful for many purposes, e.g. for the simulation of bee-like agents in virtual environments and, in combination with presented imaging system, for testing bee-inspired visual navigation strategies on mobile robots," the researchers said.

The research is published today, Friday, 6 August, in IOP Publishing's Bioinspiration and Biomimetics. (ANI)