MINIATURE robotic aircraft could soon have insect-like eyes to go with their insect-like wings. Neurobiologists have developed an artificial bee eye, with a 280-degree field of vision, which should enable robots to see more of the world around them.
Wolfgang Stürzl and colleagues at Bielefeld University in Germany wanted to capture the widest view possible using a single camera. To do this, the team used a combination of mirrors and lenses.
In their set-up, a dome-shaped mirror, with a lens at its centre, was placed 20 millimetres in front of the camera’s charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor chip.…
