Accurately judging distance is one of the biggest challenges facing modern robotics.

Now, however, British scientists claim to have made a breakthrough thanks to the example of an unlikely candidate: a praying mantis wearing some fashionably questionable red glasses.

Currently, robot “vision” systems, such those used by drones to pick up packages or navigate around objects, tend to mimic human stereo vision.

Each eye sees a marginally different view of the world and the brain merges the two views to create a single image, while using the differences images to calculate how far away things are.

While it works well for mankind, artificial systems based on the same concept requires significant computing power, which both slows and weighs down robots.

Researchers at Newcastle University therefore looked for other examples of stereo vision in the animal kingdom and focused on the praying mantis, the only insect know to possess it.