robots.net - Virtual Bees Help Real Robots

Posted 22 Sep 2006 at 20:21 UTC by steve

Bees and ants are some of the favorite insects of roboticists as evidenced by our frequent articles about them. So it should come as no suprise that robotics researchers in Mexico are working on a stereoscopic vision system inspired by the foraging methods of bees. It sounds a bit bizarre but, after two cameras capture a scene in 3D, "virtual bees" swarm over the image seeking features of potential interest based on criteria such as texture and edges. "This technique consist[s] of comput[ing] three-dimensional coordinates just for a few principal points of the objects; after that, some computational entities -- the bees -- will find the points between the principal ones, just like the bees, in the nature, find flower patches from one flower." The areas that get the most interest from the virtual bees get the most attention from the computer when rendering the image. The result is that the portions of the image most important to robot navigation get rendered faster than less important areas. Researchers Cesar Puente and Gustavo Olague of the CICESE Evolutionary Vision lab hope to have "virtual bee vision" working on a mobile robot by the end of 2006.

Yes i like the stufy of bees 3d vision etc. and their then guidance to points of interest but surely this is study on a very limited creatures abilities and is not the bees main guidance just their smell system for honey etc ???,thank you though.

Steve,

This is the same algorithm as the one previously mentionned here: http://robots.net/article/1695.html

except that the other one was called the fly algorithm. I imagine that they improved it somehow.

Igor. http://pegasusbridge.blogspot.com/

Human Progression., posted 23 Sep 2006 at 17:27 UTC by marev »

Although far more complex obviously, i beleive human eyesight is the one for all people to work to duplicate,then make it even better than ours.Might seem nieve but maybe a more important end result for the world.

As far as I understand from reading this literature, the folks in France are improving this algorithm want to apply it for blind people. So yes Marev, it looks like they are tending toward duplicating the human eye.

Cheers IgorCarron,i have seen the work from france and some other places on robotic human eyes,limited vision has already been acheived and obviously once the initial vision is there it can be improved and developed now for the future.I really do beleive in the importance and the fact that the work hours should always be for curing and evolving people not figuring out how a bug does it,cheers.

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