From Natural to Artificial Camouflage: Components and Systems
This is an incremental review that addresses the challenge of developing integrated camouflage systems for robotics or defense applications.
The paper identifies components of bio-inspired artificial camouflage systems and finds that existing work treats them in isolation, hindering integrated, robust implementations.
We identify the components of bio-inspired artificial camouflage systems including actuation, sensing, and distributed computation. After summarizing recent results in understanding the physiology and system-level performance of a variety of biological systems, we describe computational algorithms that can generate similar patterns and have the potential for distributed implementation. We find that the existing body of work predominately treats component technology in an isolated manner that precludes a material-like implementation that is scale-free and robust. We conclude with open research challenges towards the realization of integrated camouflage solutions.