Compact single-shot metalens depth sensors inspired by eyes of jumping spiders

Citation:

Qi Guo, Zhujun Shi, Yao-Wei Huang, Emma Alexander, Cheng-Wei Qiu, Federico Capasso, and Todd Zickler. 2019. “Compact single-shot metalens depth sensors inspired by eyes of jumping spiders.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, 116, 46, Pp. 22959-22965.
22959.full_.pdf1.62 MB

Abstract:

Jumping spiders (Salticidae) rely on accurate depth perception for predation and navigation. They accomplish depth perception, despite their tiny brains, by using specialized optics. Each principal eye includes a multitiered retina that simultaneously receives multiple images with different amounts of defocus, and from these images, distance is decoded with relatively little computation. We introduce a compact depth sensor that is inspired by the jumping spider. It combines metalens optics, which modifies the phase of incident light at a subwavelength scale, with efficient computations to measure depth from image defocus. Instead of using a multitiered retina to transduce multiple simultaneous images, the sensor uses a metalens to split the light that passes through an aperture and concurrently form 2 differently defocused images at distinct regions of a single planar photosensor. We demonstrate a system that deploys a 3-mm-diameter metalens to measure depth over a 10-cm distance range, using fewer than 700 floating point operations per output pixel. Compared with previous passive depth sensors, our metalens depth sensor is compact, single-shot, and requires a small amount of computation. This integration of nanophotonics and efficient computation brings artificial depth sensing closer to being feasible on millimeter-scale, microwatts platforms such as microrobots and microsensor networks.
Last updated on 05/24/2020