image: A schematic illustration of mantis-inspired artificial compound eyes.
Credit: Byungjoon Bae et al., University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science
An article published in Science Robotics by a team of University of Virginia researchers has been selected as the prestigious journal’s best paper of 2024. Electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student Byungjoon Bae and his adviser, Kyusang Lee, led the award-winning research.
Science Robotics announced its selection in ScienceAdviser, the newsletter of the journal Science and its family of publications.
The article, “Stereoscopic artificial compound eyes for spatiotemporal perception in three-dimensional space,” described the team’s praying mantis eyes-mimicking vision system — artificial compound eyes with stereoscopic vision that can track objects in 3D space.
Their innovations address limitations in the way machines currently collect and process real-world visual data, which can lead to failures, such as a self-driving car not “seeing” a person or another vehicle.
“Our team’s work represents a significant scientific insight that could inspire other engineers and scientists by demonstrating a clever, biomimetic solution to complex visual processing challenges,” said Lee, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and materials science and engineering.
The team’s design mirrored a feature of the praying mantis’ visual system that gives the insect depth perception, in addition to excellent motion tracking. Achieving this capability required developing new optoelectrical engineering and data processing solutions, Bae explained in a UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science news release.
UVA electrical and computer engineering graduate students Doeon Lee, Minseong Park, Yujia Mu, Yongmin Baek and Inbo Sim, and associate professor Cong Shen, also contributed to the research.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s family of journals, which include its flagship Science and broad-scoped Science Advances, is known for publishing high-quality, frequently cited scientific research. Editors from each of Science’s focused journals — Science Signaling, Science Robotics, Science Immunology and Science Translational Medicine — picked their favorite paper of the year to feature in ScienceAdviser.
Science Robotics is the robotics field’s highest-impact journal based on Journal Citation Reports’ impact score of 26.1. Impact scores are determined by how often the publication’s articles are cited.