Miniature curved artificial compound eyes
- aLaboratory of Intelligent Systems, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland;
- bAix-Marseille Université, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut des Sciences du Mouvement, Unité Mixte de Recherche 7287, 13288 Marseille Cedex 09, France;
- cFraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering, 07745 Jena, Germany;
- dAix-Marseille Université, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre de Physique des Particules de Marseille, Unité Mixte de Recherche 7346, 13288 Marseille Cedex 09, France; and
- eLaboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Biology, University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany
See allHide authors and affiliations
Edited by Wilson S. Geisler, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, and approved April 23, 2013 (received for review November 7, 2012)

Abstract
In most animal species, vision is mediated by compound eyes, which offer lower resolution than vertebrate single-lens eyes, but significantly larger fields of view with negligible distortion and spherical aberration, as well as high temporal resolution in a tiny package. Compound eyes are ideally suited for fast panoramic motion perception. Engineering a miniature artificial compound eye is challenging because it requires accurate alignment of photoreceptive and optical components on a curved surface. Here, we describe a unique design method for biomimetic compound eyes featuring a panoramic, undistorted field of view in a very thin package. The design consists of three planar layers of separately produced arrays, namely, a microlens array, a neuromorphic photodetector array, and a flexible printed circuit board that are stacked, cut, and curved to produce a mechanically flexible imager. Following this method, we have prototyped and characterized an artificial compound eye bearing a hemispherical field of view with embedded and programmable low-power signal processing, high temporal resolution, and local adaptation to illumination. The prototyped artificial compound eye possesses several characteristics similar to the eye of the fruit fly Drosophila and other arthropod species. This design method opens up additional vistas for a broad range of applications in which wide field motion detection is at a premium, such as collision-free navigation of terrestrial and aerospace vehicles, and for the experimental testing of insect vision theories.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: dario.floreano{at}epfl.ch.
Author contributions: D.F., S.V., A.B., and N.F. designed research; R.P.-C., R.L., W.B., M.M., F.E., R.J., M.K.D., G.L., and F. Recktenwald performed research; S.V., F. Ruffier, R.L., W.B., M.M., F.E., R.J., G.L., and F. Recktenwald contributed with technical and analytic tools; D.F., R.P.-C., S.V., F. Ruffier, A.B., R.L., W.B., M.M., F.E., R.J., F. Recktenwald, H.A.M., and N.F. analyzed data; and D.F., R.P.-C., S.V., F. Ruffier, A.B., R.L., F. Recktenwald, H.A.M., and N.F. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1219068110/-/DCSupplemental.