CURVed Artificial Compound Eyes

CurvACE (CURVed Artificial Compound Eyes) was a collaborative research project funded by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). Running from October 2009 to June 2013, the project aimed to design, fabricate, and demonstrate miniature curved artificial compound eyes inspired by insect vision — specifically the compound eye of the fruit fly Drosophila.

Project Overview

Objectives

The project set out to solve a fundamental challenge in miniature vision: how to build a compact optical sensor with a panoramic field of view, high temporal resolution, and extremely low power consumption. Natural compound eyes — as found in flies, bees, and dragonflies — achieve all three by distributing thousands of simple photoreceptive units (ommatidia) across a curved surface.

CurvACE aimed to replicate this architecture artificially by developing:

• Curved microlens arrays fabricated on flexible substrates
• Neuromorphic photodetector circuits inspired by insect retinal adaptation
• Flexible printed circuit boards to interconnect optical and electronic layers
• Real-time optic flow algorithms for embedded navigation systems
• Multiple prototype configurations: cylindrical, spherical, and planar (tape-like)

Consortium Partners

• EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland) — Project coordinator. Led neuromorphic photoreceptor design, system integration, and optic flow algorithms.
• Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics (Jena, Germany) — Microlens array fabrication, curved substrate manufacturing, and optical characterization.
• Université d'Aix-Marseille / CNRS (Marseille, France) — Bio-inspired motion detection, insect vision research, and adaptive photoreceptor circuit design.
• University of Tübingen (Germany) — Visual processing algorithms, sensor characterization, and the Visual Processing Library (VPL).

Key Achievements

By the project's conclusion in 2013, the consortium had successfully:

• Built a functional cylindrical compound eye prototype measuring 12.8 mm in diameter, weighing 1.75 grams, with a volume of 2.2 cm³ and power consumption of just 0.9 watts
• Demonstrated a nearly hemispherical (180°+) panoramic field of view with uniform angular resolution
• Achieved adaptive sensitivity spanning more than five decades of light intensity, from bright sunlight to dim indoor conditions
• Published the landmark paper in PNAS (Floreano et al., 2013) documenting the design and fabrication process
• Released the Visual Processing Library — open-source software for reading, processing, and visualizing data from CurvACE sensors
• Demonstrated real-time optic flow computation suitable for autonomous micro-aerial vehicle navigation

Applications

The project explored several application domains for curved compound eyes:

• Autonomous micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs): Using panoramic optic flow for obstacle avoidance, altitude regulation, and terrain-following flight
• Surveillance and monitoring: Wide-field visual motion detection for security and environmental sensing
• Wearable sensors: Flexible, lightweight imagers conformable to curved surfaces on clothing or equipment
• Medical and industrial inspection: Miniature panoramic cameras for endoscopy and pipe inspection

Legacy

The CurvACE project advanced the state of the art in bio-inspired optical sensing and demonstrated that insect-inspired compound-eye architectures could be realized at miniature scale with existing microfabrication technology. The project's publications continue to be cited in research on wide-field sensors, neuromorphic vision, and autonomous robotic navigation.

The original project website content is preserved in the Internet Archive.

View archived CurvACE project site on the Wayback Machine →

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