Kevin Pratt, from the Center for Robot-Assisted Search And Rescue and the Institute for Safety, Security, and Rescue Technologies at the University of South Florida wieghs in on our earlier post about Bee Brains:

A quick comment regarding the post about Bee Brains. There has actually been a fair amount of interest and research into bio-mimetic control and vision systems.

From my work with UAVs, I’m most familiar with a company called Centeye, which has produced a bio-mimetic, mixed-mode VLSI optic flow sensor based on how dragonflies navigate With their own work and work with Drexel, [PDF] they’ve been able to do autonomous collision avoidance and altitude hold with small fixed-wing UAVs.

I’m less familiar with this work, but Ruffier et al [PDF]. from University de la Mediterranee in France have also done some work in developing altitude hold capability for a small rotary-wing UAV using a silicon equivalent of the Elementary Motion Detector (EMD) neurons found in Drosophilia melanogaster (or fruit flys).

Suicidebots would just like to state that the best way to sweet talk us is to use phrases like ‘altitude hold capability for a small rotary-wing UAV’ and initiate cocktail conversation comparing the recessive tendencies of your own personal colony of drosophila melanogaster. R0wr.

Anyhow, these links and many many more are very enlightening, and will provide many hours of fun plotting your Robot Insect Defense Force. Be careful though, the fourth link down on the google search results for ‘VLSI chip’ will totally crash your browser. Okay, now you are all going to try it anyway and blame us, so save yer damn work first. . .

Be sure also to check out the links for the Center for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue, that place and what they have done deserves its own post pretty quick. . .

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IN OTHER NEWS, we have diddled out template a bit and come up with what appears to be a very fine contact form. Do drop us a line about the site, that cool thing you saw that one time, and whatsisname that had that machine at that one event.

Operators are standing by.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Neat Stuff, Robot Overlords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.