By Roland Piquepaille
Several articles appeared recently about the "o-retina" chip created at the University at Buffalo, and has all the functionalities of an octopus retina. Let's start with "Octopus eyes open new electronic vision," from the Christian Science Monitor.Ask any aquarium curator, and you'll discover just how much an octopus likes to explore its environment. A master escape artist whose soft body can contort itself through the smallest of openings, the octopus is the brainiest of animals without backbones, and it has keen eyesight. Those attributes attracted Albert Titus, a University of Buffalo professor, to study how an octopus sees, and to mimic that structure and function in a silicon chip called the o-retina.
His goal is to create electronic vision systems that could be used in robots to explore the oceans, outer space, and harsh environments. Professor Titus and his colleagues developed an experimental version of the o-retina chip, which is about the size of a narrow Post-it Note.
On the same subject, the University at Buffalo Reporter wrote "Silicon chip mimics function of octopus retina."
Below, you can see a silicon chip (right) mimicking an octopus retina (left) (Image credit: University at Buffalo Reporter).
In "Octopus or Eagle Eyes? Oufitting a Robot for Its Mission," the New York Times gives additional details on the chip manufacturing.
To create the electronic octopus eye, Dr. Titus turned to retina chips, a technology pioneered at the California Institute of Technology. Such chips are created with the same complementary metal oxide semiconductor, or CMOS, technology used in some digital cameras. But Dr. Titus said that retina chips operate differently from CMOS chips and the other common image-sensing technology, charge-coupled devices, or C.C.D.'s.
All three kinds of sensors start out with an analog signal that converts different intensities of light falling onto them into different electrical voltages. Conventional sensors then quickly transform those varying voltages into digital code. But in Dr. Titus's device, which he calls an o-retina, "the goal is to never digitize the signal," he said.
"We're trying to mimic animals,'' he explained, "and animals aren't digital."
Now, Titus wants to add other properties to his "o-retina" and build other chips based on other animals, like the eagle for viewing objects far away, or the lion to better see in a desert.
The researchers published their work in Optical Engineering in August 2003. Here is the abstract of this paper, "Optical output silicon retina chip."
We describe a unique implementation of an optical-in/optical-out focal plane processor whose functionality is derived from a biological retina. The retina chip has increased control over the output through a novel differential difference amplifier and a clocked analog scheme. Processing is done on-chip to produce an edge-detected version of the optical input signal. However, the output signal is also optical, enabled by a liquid crystal spatial light modulator on the chip. We present experimental results from a 19×19 array and demonstrate how the edge information can be controlled on-chip and read out in parallel from each processing cell.
Sources: Lori Valigra, Special to The Christian Science Monitor, October 16, 2003; John Della Contrada, University at Buffalo Reporter, October 2, 2003; Ian Austen, The New York Times, October 16, 2003; Optical Engineering, August 2003, Volume 42, Issue 8, pp. 2416-2426
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