A Hemispherical Omni-directional Bio Inspired Optical Sensor

Flying insects possess a surprisingly competent vision and navigation system, which enables them to control various manoeuvres in their flight. In this paper, we have developed ahemispherical omni-directional optical sensor inspired by the compound eye of flying insects. Here, we show the feasibility of asystem based on a low complexity optoelectronic system that estimates the optic flow, essentially based on biological findings on the fly Elementary Motion Detectors (EMDs). The valuableproperties of our hemispherical compound eye include being lightweight, low power consumption, panoramic field of view andmulti resolution. The developed modular system with 128 photoreceptors (up-gradable to 256), with a payload of somehundred grams and power consumption less than 300 mW is light enough to make it suitable to be mounted on UAVs, MAVs and mobile robot applications

Keywords:

Compound eye , elementary motion detection (EMD) , moving obstacle detection , omni-directional camera