Communications of the ACM
Dragonflies Can See By Switching 'on' and 'off'
Researchers hope to learn from how the dragonfly responds to dark moving targets, and to use that knowledge to improve the visual systems of robots.
Credit: David Lavallee
The vision systems for robots could benefit from research into the visual circuit in the brain of dragonflies, suggests a team from the University of Adelaide. The brain of a dragonfly combines opposite pathways—both an ON and OFF switch—when processing information about dark objects, which likely represent potential prey.
"We discovered that the responses to the dark targets were much greater than we expected, and that the dragonfly's ability to respond to a dark moving target is from the correlation of opposite contrast pathways: OFF with ON," says Steven Wiederman from the university's Center for Neuroscience Research.
This mechanism is of great interest for visual neurosciences in general, and for solving engineering applications in target detection and tracking. "Understanding how visual systems work can have a range of outcomes, such as in the development of neural prosthetics and improvements in robot vision," Wiederman notes.
Adelaide researchers are now working to build an autonomous robot that would emulate the dragonfly's vision and movement.
From University of Adelaide
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