To get a better idea of the future of robotic eye design, Gavin Taylor turned to X-rays.
The fungus gnat fly, captured in the image above, is a fairly common insect. However, the one captured by Taylor, a biologist working at Lund University, Sweden, is not your average fly. Over 40 million years ago, this tiny gnat got trapped in amber and created an endocast. Now, Taylor is studying the scan from the fossil to get a better idea of how small robotic eyes might work.
With the help of microCT scanning he's able to see how insect eyes have evolved over the centuries and by doing so get a better understanding of optical engineering. “Given that insects rely on visual information to control many aspects of their behaviour such as finding food and navigating, they have evolved to strike a good balance between trade-offs on resolution and sensitivity,” he says.
Taylor explains that these trade-offs have a close resemblance to visualisation systems in miniature robotics, such as cameras. “Like an insect, as the size of a visual system is reduced, for example on a DSLR, trade-offs start to be required between its effective resolution and sensitivity.”
The process of capturing this image wasn’t simple. The team at Lund University used an X-ray micro-computed-tomography (microCT), which is similar to a medical CT scan but at much higher resolution. “The microCT scan provides an image volume, and I used analysis software called Amira to extract a 3D surface describing the border between the amber and the endocast of the gnat,” Taylor says.
And, of course, the image reveals the amazing complexity of nature. “My aim was to show the beautiful structure within just a single eye, of what for most people is an insect that would be so easily overlooked”.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
