Image courtesy http://robobees.seas.harvard.edu/

Centeye is honored to have participated in the Harvard University Robobees project, directed by Prof. Robert Wood. Our primary goal was to help develop a vision sensor system that will fit in a small flying robot about 2cm in size. During this project we produced a 40 milligram vision sensor that flew on a RoboBee prototype to provide stabilization along 1DOF and a self-contained 125 milligram optical flow sensor.

Wide angle vision sensors on a tight budget (with Sanjeev Koppal and Todd Zickler):

Dr. Koppal and Prof. Zickler developed a fascinating technique to implement basic target detection with the majority of computation performed optically. Dr. Koppal has an excellent description of this effort on his site. This project is in some ways a conceptual descendent of Centeye’s flat printed optics, but they clearly took this approach to a completely new level.

 

Reference: “Wide-angle Micro Sensors for Vision on a Tight Budget”, S J. Koppal, I. Gkioulekas, T. Zickler and G. Barrows, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2011

TinyTam image sensor (September 2010):

Prototyped in Summer of 2010, this sensor weights 125 milligrams, this mass including optics, image sensing, and processing using an ATtiny processor. Details may be found at this post on Embedded Eye. The image sensor is a Centeye Tamalpais chip- two versions are available, with resolutions of 16×16 and 8×8 on a focal plane about 450um wide. For optics we used a pinhole printed on plastic. We still have about 200 of each of these chips left over from this project…