A new sensor inspired by the retina—the layer of cells in human and animal eyes that detects light and transmits signals to the brain—could improve the safety and performance of self-driving cars, robotics and high-speed autonomous drones.
The advance, created by a multi-institution team led by Akhilesh Jaiswal, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, appears in the September 2023 issue of the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.
Jaiswal says he got the idea for the sensor after reading a news article about recent discoveries in human vision. “It said that the eyes are smarter than what scientists believed,” he remembers. “That just stayed with me for a while. And I thought, well, if you can put that kind of smartness into cameras, it would be good.”