Reverse-Engineering Insect Brains to Make Robots
August 12th, 2022Via: EETimes:
British startup Opteran, a spin–out of the University of Sheffield, has a completely different view of neuromorphic engineering compared to most of the industry. The company has reverse–engineered insect brains to derive new algorithms for collision avoidance and navigation that can be used in robotics.
Opteran calls its new approach to AI “natural intelligence,” taking direct biological inspiration for the algorithm portion of the system. This approach is separate to existing computer vision approaches, which mainly use either mainstream AI/deep learning or photogrammetry, a technique that uses 2D photographs to infer information about 3D objects, such as dimensions.
Opteran’s natural intelligence requires no training data, and no training, more like how a biological brain works. Deep learning today is capable of narrow AI — it can execute carefully defined tasks within a limited environment such as a computer game — but huge amounts of training data is required, as are computation and power consumption. Opteran wants to get around the limitations of deep learning by closely mimicking what brains really do, in order to build autonomous robots that can interact with the real world while on a tight computation and energy budget.
“Our purpose is to reverse– or re–engineer nature’s algorithms to create a software brain that enables machines to perceive, behave, and adapt more like natural creatures,” said professor James Marshall, chief scientific officer at Opteran, in a recent presentation at the Embedded Vision Summit.
