How Desert locust Inspired Collision-avoidance Sensors

Schistocerca gregaria · Animal · Arid and semi-arid regions of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia

What if the solution to ultra-fast collision detection had already been perfected — by a desert locust over 200 million years of evolution?

The Natural Innovation

Locusts can fly in dense swarms of millions without colliding. Each locust has a specialized visual neuron — the Lobula Giant Movement Detector (LGMD) — that fires only when an object is approaching on a collision course, triggering an evasive maneuver in under 50 milliseconds.

The desert locust lives in Arid and semi-arid regions of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.

In the language of biomimicry, this falls under the Sense › Detect approaching objects category.

The Design Principle

A sparse, neuromorphic sensor that responds only to expanding visual stimuli (looming objects) enables ultra-fast collision detection with minimal computational overhead — contrast with dense camera arrays that process entire scenes.

Human Applications

Collision-avoidance systems for autonomous vehicles, drones, and robots that must react faster than conventional camera-based AI systems. The LGMD architecture requires far less computation than deep learning approaches.

Real-world implementations include: Locust-inspired collision avoidance chip (University of Lincoln), agricultural drone obstacle avoidance systems.

Source: AskNature.org