[alexbock]

The human eye has some interesting optical defects like chromatic aberration that man-made optical systems usually fix in hardware but that the brain fixes in software. These aberrations, when available to the software as uncorrected input, can provide information useful for determining how to focus properly (and by extension, focus distance, which gives you distance-to-point information dependent on DOF). [1]

Modern photographic lenses tend to contain a large number of lenses in series, a few of which often have an exotic property like being apochromatic, aspheric, or made of fluorite, but such well-corrected lenses may be counter-productive for machine vision. Phase detection in a DSLR relies on separate collection sites like stereo vision, but autofocus still hunts under bad conditions.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3189032/