Optical Design And Simulation Of The Artificial Compound Eyes

The artificial compound eyes as a novel optical imaging system have some characteristics like the large field of view (FOV), the small size, light weight and high sensitivity. With the continuous development of ultra-precision processing technology, it is essential to design a reasonable artificial compound eye for processing and application. In this paper, three different artificial compound eyes are designed. The characteristics and imaging principle of the different compound eyes’structure are mainly discussed, and their respective advantages and disadvantages are given. Simulation is carried out by optical software to verify the imaging characteristics of compound eyes’system.The main contents of this paper are as follows:1. Detailed analyses and discussion of the plane artificial compound eyes system are carried out; through the analysis and calculation, an artificial compound eye system is obtained whose thickness is2.4mm. The crosstalk is eliminated by adding aperture and eyesight diaphragm. Spherical lens is replaced by aspheric lens to improve the image quality of the ommatidium. Lastly, the imaging principle and characteristics of the plane artificial compound eye is verified by the ray trace of the optical software.2. Due to the small FOV of the plane artificial compound eyes, we put forward the Curved artificial compound eyes structure. A lateral compound eye system is designed; through the simulation and experimental analysis, we get its FOV that can reach60°. In order to further expand the FOV, a medial compound eye is proposed, and the imaging principle is discussed. Ray tracing is carried out to prove that the FOV of the latter structure is larger than former one, and the increment of the FOV is approximate50%.3. A multilayer curved compound eye system is proposed, in which seven ommatidia are designed to achieve a large FOV (180°). Besides, the image quality decreasing with the increasing of the FOV, is improved. Influences on the blind area and overlap rate of the field angle of ommatidium and the angle between each ommatidium’s optical axes are analyzed in detail. Through the analysis and comparison, when the field angle of ommatidium is68.5°, and the angle between each ommatidium’s optical axes is63.8°, the blind area of the system decreases to1%and the utilization ratio of the FOV reaches80%. The single ommatidium system is design by the optical software and then the aberration is correct. Finally, overall modeling and simulation are conducted to verify the image characteristics of the proposed compound eyes.