/ News
Robots Are Using Dragonfly Eyes To Better Track Moving Objects
Scientists Zahra Bagheri and Benjamin Cazzolato, and robot.
The University of Adelaide
Some robots of the future will see the world through the eyes of insects. In a study published this week in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface, researchers have developed software that lets machines track moving objects with the same precision as dragonflies.
Although dragonflies have puny brains and vision with extremely low resolution, they are still able to catch prey with greater than 95 percent accuracy against oft-cluttered backgrounds such as swarms of other insects. What’s more, they can do this while flying upwards of 60 miles-per-hour.
The robot the researchers are developing will look more like a yellow Tonka truck than a flying insect, but what’s important is that its vision system could be used in the future for such things as smart cars, bionics and surveillance, said Zahra Bagheri, the lead author of the study.
“There are so many labs in the world that are developing animal-like robots,” she said. “It’s the algorithm that interests us.”
To get the data needed for the algorithm, Bagheri’s team first identified a set of neurons in dragonfly brains that specifically track tiny moving objects, which give the insects' their incredible abilities to follow and intercept prey. In the lab, the researchers plucked the wings from dragonflies and drilled a tiny hole into its head where they could put an electrode onto the neurons. In a method analogous to the rehabilitation scene from A Clockwork Orange, the researchers placed the dragonflies in front of a monitor and showed them different stimuli while they recorded data from the neurons.
The researchers found that the dragonfly’s ability to filter out noise helps them track targets moving along continuous trajectories, Bagheri said. She compared this method of filtering stimuli to people who are deep sleepers.
“You might be someone with a deeper sleep or someone who has a light sleep,” said Bagheri. “The one with the deeper sleep allows them not to wake up to everything, only their alarm. The light sleeper might wake up to any kind of stimuli.”
Dragonflies also have an “active gaze control” where their eyes are fixed, and they can only rotate their heads. This forces it to keep its target within five degrees from its central view. This was an integral part of the tracking algorithm that Bagheri and her team created.
"Instead of just trying to keep the target perfectly centered on its field of view, our system locks on to the background and lets the target move against it," she said
The researchers tested how good their algorithm was at tracking motion by making it analyze moving targets in a virtual simulation of the outside world. They took photos of nature scenes around Adelaide, Australia, and used a computer to stitch them together into a cylinder-shaped panorama. Then, they made their algorithm track objects moving in a three-dimensional space, a kind of virtual dragonfly’s eye. The results were encouraging: their algorithm was 20 times faster than other similar programs at locating a target in a cluttered environment. The robot that will use this vision system might be completed in the next few months, said Bagheri.
Emulating the vision of insects isn’t new to the field of robotics. In a 2013 study published in PNAS, researchers created a curved robotic eye that would produce a mosaic effect like that of the eyes of fruit flies, giving it a large field of vision and excellent motion detecting capabilities. And just last March, a tiny three-ounce drone used a vision system based off that of bees to help visually gauge its position and stay level with uneven terrain, without using a large accelerometer.
Source: http://www.popsci.com/robots-are-getting-better-vision-thanks-dragonfly-eyes
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
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Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
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• International social movement
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• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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