Research in the laboratory of Professor Charles Higgins employs both engineering and biological techniques to study insect vision. Our projects are in the areas of computational neuroscience (focusing on insect visual motion processing), biologically-inspired engineering systems (including biologically-inspired robotics), hybrid bio-robotics (robots incorporating living insects as sensors), visual electrophysiology (in flies, moths, and dragonflies) and upon occasion behavioral experiments (in honeybees and bumblebees).

The unifying goal of all our projects is to address the question of how engineers can learn from the representations and computational architectures demonstrated by neurobiology, which are quite different from (and in many cases functionally superior to) conventional engineering systems, to build vastly improved autonomous robots and artificial vision systems. These projects are conducted in close collaboration with other neurobiology laboratories who perform anatomical, electrophysiological, behavioral, and histological studies in insects.

This page updated on 1/3/11.