TOKYO — If you thought Volvo's use of locusts to research the next generation of collision avoidance systems sounded far-fetched, wait till you hear about Nissan's employment of bumblebees to do the same thing.In contrast to locusts, which send information directly from their visual senses to their wings, bypassing their brain, the bumblebee uses its compound eyes to avoid midair collisions with other bees.Co-developed with the Center for Advanced Science and Technology at Japan's prestigious Tokyo University, Nissan has built the Bio-mimetic Car Robot Drive, or BR23C, a robotic microcar that re-creates bee characteristics with the end goal of producing a system that prevents collisions altogether. Nissan unveiled this futuristic technology at the Cutting-edge IT & Electronics Comprehensive Exhibition (CEATEC 2008) in Japan this week.Described by Kazuhiro Doi, general manager for Technology PR and R&D brand management, as a further extension of Nissan's four-layered safety shield, the BR23C car robot aims to enhance the innermost layer of the shield, and in so doing, reinforce the company's collision avoidance capability. 'In flight, each bee creates its own oval-shaped personal space which in fact closely resembles our own safety shield,' said Doi.But more crucially, it is the bee's compound eyes, capable of seeing for more than 300 degrees in all directions that allow the bumblebee to fly uninterrupted inside its own personal space.In order to re-create the function of a compound eye, engineers came up with the idea of a laser range finder. The LRF detects obstacles up to 2 meters away within a 180-degree radius in front of the BR23C, calculates the distance to them and sends a signal to an onboard microprocessor, which is instantly translated into collision avoidance.'The split second it detects an obstacle, the car robot will mimic the movements of a bee and instantly change direction by turning its wheels at right angles or greater to avoid a collision. The biggest difference from any current system is that the avoidance maneuver is totally instinctive. If that was not so, then the car robot would not be able to react fast enough to avoid obstacles,' explained Yukishi Sakai, senior manager in the technology development division.Manager of the Mobility Laboratory and principal engineer of the car robot, Toshiyuki Andoh points out that, 'It must react instinctively and instantly because this technology corresponds to the most vulnerable and innermost layer of our safety shield, a layer in which a crash is currently considered unavoidable. The whole process must happen within the blink of an eye.'What this means to you: This is the first step in developing instantaneous collision avoidance technology, which Nissan anticipates will find its way into production cars within 10 years. — Peter Lyon, Correspondent