A monocular wide-field speed sensor inspired by the crabs' visual system for traffic analysis.

The development of visual sensors for traffic analysis can benefit from mimicking two fundamental aspects of the visual system of crabs: their panoramic vision and their visual processing strategy adapted to a flat world. First, the use of omnidirectional cameras in urban environments allows for analyzing the simultaneous movement of many objects of interest over broad areas. This would reduce the costs and complications associated with infrastructure: installation, synchronization, maintenance, and operation of traditional vision systems that use multiple cameras with a limited field of view.

Nonlinearity-induced synchronization enhancement in micromechanical oscillators.

An autonomous oscillator synchronizes to an external harmonic force only when the forcing frequency lies within a certain interval-known as the synchronization range-around the oscillator's natural frequency. Under ordinary conditions, the width of the synchronization range decreases when the oscillation amplitude grows, which constrains synchronized motion of micro- and nanomechanical resonators to narrow frequency and amplitude bounds. Here, we show that nonlinearity in the oscillator can be exploited to manifest a regime where the synchronization range increases with increasing oscillation amplitude.

Synchronization properties of self-sustained mechanical oscillators.

We study, both analytically and numerically, the dynamics of mechanical oscillators kept in motion by a feedback force, which is generated electronically from a signal produced by the oscillators themselves. This kind of self-sustained systems may become standard in the design of frequency-control devices at microscopic scales. Our analysis is thus focused on their synchronization properties under the action of external forces and on the joint dynamics of two to many coupled oscillators.