A simple route to fabricate artificial compound eye structures

A biologically inspired compound-eye structure, which composes of ∼5,867 honeycomb-patterned microlenses, was fabricated on a hemispherical shell. The fabrication process was simple and low-cost, which involves a femtosecond laser-enhanced wet etching and casting process followed by a thermomechanical process to convert the film into a hemispherical surface. By optimizing the parameters of thermomechanical process to form the curvilinear surface, the experimental result shows that the microlenses are omnidirectionally aligned on the dome with lens diameters of ∼85 μm and the angle between two lens of ∼2°, and the individual microlenses have rudimentary focusing and imaging properties. The artificial compound-eye structure fabricated by this method has great potential applications in scale-invariant processing, robot vision, and fast motion detection.