Visual guidance based on optic flow: a biorobotic approach.

Abstract

This paper addresses some basic questions as to how vision links up with action and serves to guide locomotion in both biological and artificial creatures. The thorough knowledge gained during the past five decades on insects' sensory-motor abilities and the neuronal substrates involved has provided us with a rich source of inspiration for designing tomorrow's self-guided vehicles and micro-vehicles, which will be able to cope with unforeseen events on the ground, under water, in the air, in space, on other planets, and inside the human body. Insects can teach us some useful tricks for designing agile autonomous robots. Since constructing a "biorobot" first requires exactly formulating the biological principles presumably involved, it gives us a unique opportunity of checking the soundness and robustness of these principles by bringing them face to face with the real physical world. "Biorobotics" therefore goes one step beyond computer simulation. It leads to experimenting with real physical robots which have to pass the stringent test of the real world. Biorobotics provide us with a new tool, which can help neurobiologists and neuroethologists to identify and investigate worthwhile issues in the field of sensory-motor control. Here we describe some of the visually guided terrestrial and aerial robots we have developed since 1985 on the basis of our biological findings. All these robots behave in response to the optic flow, i.e., they work by measuring the slip speed of the retinal image. Optic flow is sensed on-board by miniature electro-optical velocity sensors. The very principle of these sensors was based on studies in which we recorded the responses of single identified neurons to single photoreceptor stimulation in a model visual system: the fly's compound eye.