Crustaceans are a bit like superheroes in the underwater world. With their sturdy exoskeletons and menacing claws, they look straight out of a fantasy movie.Like lobsters, some live for over 100 years. And while they’re usually coveted for their culinary qualities, this time they’ve inspired cutting-edge cuisine. vision technology with great potential driverless carThis tiny crustacean that lives on Australian coral reefs is called the mantis shrimp (gonodactylus smithii), has some good skills. First, it can hit at bullet speed (350 meters per second), so it literally punches past its weight. And, more relevant to the topic at hand, it utilizes a highly complex visual system to enable high-contrast detection of prey in shallow water.And these high-contrast situations are technical challenge For unmanned vehicles.
In 2016, the first fatality in an accident involving a driverless vehicle was recorded in the United States. reason? The on-board camera couldn’t distinguish between the clear sky and the white lorry ahead. The incident prompted University of Illinois researcher Viktor Gruevm to technology solution for the problem. So he began studying the mantis shrimp’s visual system, which allowed him to see the subtle nuances of extreme light and dark at the same time. This is technically called high dynamic range, and some modern TVs, such as those with OLED panels, can provide high brightness and deep blacks at the same time. Mantis shrimp detect polarization, a property of light in which light waves oscillating in multiple planes are constrained to oscillate along a single plane. This means that the visual system responds to light logarithmically rather than linearly.
Gruev takes this logarithmic response as new camera technology It has 500,000 sensors that detect dark and light areas of a scene. Thus, his camera offers 10,000 times more contrast than his current system. This means it can identify objects regardless of color and works even in hazy conditions. Another advantage of this technology is that it is based on off-the-shelf components, so devices of this type should hit the market soon. Finally, these cameras may also have interesting applications in cancer cell detection and underwater exploration.
How do self-driving cars “see”?
Self-driving cars currently have multiple Technologies for assessing the environmentIn addition to conventional cameras, it is equipped with a LIDAR system that uses pulsed lasers to establish the distance of surrounding objects.this InnovationHowever, being colorblind, other systems such as thermal imaging must be added to the mix. All this information is fed into AI systems to interpret context and identify humans, animals, vehicles, obstacles, and more. Driving under real conditions involving millions of variables is an undeniable challenge, State-of-the-art technologyAnd, as the mantis shrimp proves, nature offers us a helping hand.
sauce: engineering.com
