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Neuromorphic vision sensors or event cameras have made the visual perception of extremely low reaction time possible, opening new avenues for high-dynamic robotics applications. These event cameras’ output is dependent on both motion and texture. However, the event camera fails to capture object edges that are parallel to the camera motion. This is a problem intrinsic to the sensor and therefore challenging to solve algorithmically. Human vision deals with perceptual fading using the active mechanism of small involuntary eye movements, the most prominent ones called microsaccades. By moving the eyes constantly and slightly during fixation, microsaccades can substantially maintain texture stability and persistence. Inspired by microsaccades, we designed an event-based perception system capable of simultaneously maintaining low reaction time and stable texture. In this design, a rotating wedge prism was mounted in front of the aperture of an event camera to redirect light and trigger events. The geometrical optics of the rotating wedge prism allows for algorithmic compensation of the additional rotational motion, resulting in a stable texture appearance and high informational output independent of external motion. The hardware device and software solution are integrated into a system, which we call artificial microsaccade–enhanced event camera (AMI-EV). Benchmark comparisons validated the superior data quality of AMI-EV recordings in scenarios where both standard cameras and event cameras fail to deliver. Various real-world experiments demonstrated the potential of the system to facilitate robotics perception both for low-level and high-level vision tasks. 

Detailed kinetic models are widely used in combustion modeling, and their size has been significantly increasing over the past decades. With the increasing size and varied data sources, there is need to detect chemical and syntax errors in the model to prevent the simulation from failure. In this work, we present a new open-source web based tool —ChemCheck, to help identify the incorrect data format, inappropriate pressure-dependent and duplicate reaction rate parameters, visualize the thermodynamic inconsistencies and the violations of collision limit. The main goal of this tool is to help Cantera, an open-source suite of tools for problems involving chemical kinetics, thermodynamics, and transport processes, debug the possible errors during computation, so a workflow about coupling Cantera and ChemCheck to improve a detailed kinetic model is demonstrated.