Caltech scientists create robot surrogate for blind persons in testing visual ...(tensively. But few people worldwide have...)

Another way is to give sighted people devices that downgrade their vision to what might be expected using artificial vision prostheses. And this, too, is often done. But it's a less-than-ideal solution since the brain of a sighted person is adept at taking poor-quality images and processing them in various ways, adding detail as needed. This processing is what allows most people to see in dim light, for example, or through smoke or fog.

"A sighted person's objectivity is impaired," Fink says. "They may not be able to get to the level of what a blind person truly experiences."

Enter one more possible solution: CYCLOPS. "We can use CYCLOPS in lieu of a blind person," Fink explains. "We can equip it with a camera just like what a blind person would have with a retinal prosthesis, and that puts us in the unique position of being able to dictate what the robot receives as visual input."

Now, if scientists want to see how much better the resolution is when a retinal prosthesis has an array of 50 pixels as opposed to 16 pixels, they can try both out on CYCLOPS. They might do this by asking the robot to follow a black line down a white-tiled hallway, or seeing if it can findand entera darkened doorway.

"We're not quite at that stage yet," Fink cautions, referring to such independent maneuvering.

CYCLOPS's camera is gimballed, which means it can emulate left-to-right and up-and-down head movements. The input from the camera runs through the onboard computing platform, which does real-time image processing. For now, however, the platform itself is moved around remotely, via a joystick. "The platform can be operated from anywhere in the world, through its wireless Internet connection," says Tarbell.

"We have the image-processing algorithms running locally on the robot's pl
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