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CurvACE Gives Robots a Bug's Eye View
Zothecula writes "Robots are getting down to the size of insects, so it seems only natural that they should be getting insect eyes. A consortium of European researchers has developed the artificial Curved Artificial Compound Eye (CurvACE) which reproduces the architecture of the eyes of insects and other arthropods. The aim isn't just to provide machines with an unnerving bug-eyed stare, but to create a new class of sensors that exploit the wide field of vision and motion detecting properties of the compound eye."
The single eye with lens has evolved at least twice on Earth (once in vertebrates and once in arthropods) so it seems like the natural option. Still insects have evolved a different solution for vision. The obvious answer to that is that compound eyes are more practical when your head is tiny.
I've read somewhere that a mammal style eye on a bee would have to fill its entire head to be useful. A smaller eye would have an aperture only a couple of wavelenghts wide which would render a traditional lens incapable of forming an image.
The other way around. The maximum resolution of a lens is limited by diffraction. The only way around that limitation is to increase the number of lenses (compound eyes), or increase the size (simple eyes). Increasing the number is a simple solution and works pretty well when you're tiny and so can't have high resolution vision anyway. As you get bigger, the increase-the-size-of-the-lens solution becomes much more efficient, so most bigger organisms have simple eyes. If humans had compound eyes, they would have to be ridiculously large (the size of a house, by one estimation) to give equivalent resolution: http://web.neurobio.arizona.edu/gronenberg/nrsc581/eyedesign/visualacuity.pdf.