UK-based Opteran nabs €2.3 million to solve robot autonomy, inspired by insects

Today the UK natural intelligence company Opteran has raised around €2.3 million in seed funding to pioneer its lightweight, silicon-based approach to autonomy, created by testing insect brains, in what to some would sound a little like a Black Mirror episode. Opteran is a University of Sheffield spin-out based on eight years of research by Professor James Marshall and Dr. Alex Cope into insect brains as part of the Green Brain and Brains on Board projects. Although insects have smaller brains, they are still capable of sophisticated decision making and navigation using optic flow to perceive depth and distance. The Opteran team state that this is a far more efficient, robust and transparent way to achieve autonomy than current deep learning techniques, enabling the team to reverse-engineer insect brains to produce algorithms requiring no data centre or extensive pre-training. It means Opteran can mimic tasks such as seeing, sensing objects, obstacle avoidance, navigation and decision making.