Robotic vision systems to benefit from advances in neuromorphic engineering

• Robots are a long way from being as sophisticated as the movies would have you believe.
• It mimics insect vision and is designed to follow a moving object.
• "We don't have robots that can physically compete with humans in any way," says Charles Higgins, assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Arizona.
• "Wouldn't it be nice to have a robot that could actually see you and interact with you visually?"
• If Higgins has his way, at least some of the first steps toward that goal will be achieved in the next ten to 20 years through neuromorphic engineering, a discipline that combines biology and electronics.
• Higgins and his students are developing an airborne visual navigation system by creating electronic clones of insect vision processing systems in analog integrated circuits.
• In traditional digital computers, problems are solved in serial fashion, where a single fast digital processor flashes through a series of steps to solve the problem sequentially.
• "Just because most computers are designed around a single, powerful processor doesn't mean that's the way they have to be designed," Higgins explained.
• Higgins hopes to see robotic vision develop in the same way that robotic speech processing has during the past 30 years.
• Higgins wants to develop a microchip-based vision system that could follow a moving object like a soccer ball without getting confused by similarly shaped or colored objects, or a chip that would recognize different objects --- a sidewalk crack it could roll over, for instance, from a ditch that it couldn't.
• Building vision systems for toys might sound a bit frivolous, particularly coming from high-powered university laboratories, but toys account for a huge amount of money in the U.S. economy.