Artificial Retinas Can Balance a Pencil On Its End

mikejuk writes "A team of researchers has built a neural information system that is good enough and fast enough to balance a pencil in real time. If you think it's an easy task, try it! The Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH / University Zurich have used what look like video cameras to do the job but in fact they are analog silicon retinas. They work so fast that even with fairly basic hardware they can balance a pencil."

Comments

Video Date:

[Shikaku]

September 26, 2008

biomimetic for purely philosophical reasons

[drewm1980]

I have seen this demo in person and chatted at length with its creator. It uses a custom sensor chip that does some analog temporal filtering and thresholding of light intensity at each pixel, sending events when the threshold is crossed. The intent of the authors seems to be to mimic the human visual system in silicon, even if it makes no engineering sense whatsoever. The demo was extremely sensitive to fluorescent lighting; the author had to run out and buy an incandescent desk lamp to get it to work at all. The event-based image representation makes it incompatible with everything that has been learned in computer vision over the last decade.