WHEN autonomous aircraft start buzzing over our heads like giant insects, they could be fitted with video cameras that give them wide-angle vision to rival that of insects themselves.
Previous attempts to achieve this have mimicked the compound eyes that insects use to create a mosaic of partially overlapping images (New Scientist, 6 May, p 30). This works well for spotting movement, but is not so good at picking out individual objects from a complicated scene.
Now Christel-loic Tisse and Hugh Durrant-Whyte at the University of Sydney, Australia, and Andrew Hicks from Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, have come…
