Opteran secures £2.1m to ‘solve autonomy’ in robotics

Based on eight years of research into insect brains by Sheffield University's Prof. James Marshall and Dr. Alex Cope, Opteran has begun to develop lightweight, low cost silicon ‘brains’ inspired by insects.

Although insects have smaller brains, they are capable of sophisticated decision making and navigation using so-called optic flow to perceive depth and distance. Opteran are said to have reverse-engineered insect brains to produce algorithms requiring no data centre or extensive pre-training, enabling the potential to mimic tasks such as seeing, sensing objects, obstacle avoidance, navigation and decision making.

The funding round was led by IQ Capital with Episode1, Join and Seraphim Capital. Following on from a pre-seed round from the Connecting Capabilities Fund of the Great British Business Bank, the latest round also includes angel investors and a CCF Grant as part of the Northern Triangle Initiative.

According to the start-up, a recent trial saw the successful control of a sub-250g drone with complete onboard autonomy using fewer than 10,000 pixels from a single low-resolution panoramic camera.