Automatic tracking of free-flying insects using a cable-driven robot

Abstract

Flying insects have evolved to develop efficient strategies to navigate in natural environments. Yet, studying them experimentally is difficult because of their small size and high speed of motion. Consequently, previous studies were limited to tethered flights, hovering flights, or restricted flights within confined laboratory chambers. Here, we report the development of a cable-driven parallel robot, named lab-on-cables, for tracking and interacting with a free-flying insect. In this approach, cameras are mounted on cables, so as to move automatically with the insect. We designed a reactive controller that minimizes the online tracking error between the position of the flying insect, provided by an embedded stereo-vision system, and the position of the moving lab, computed from the cable lengths. We validated the lab-on-cables with Agrotis ipsilon moths (ca. 2 centimeters long) flying freely up to 3 meters per second. We further demonstrated, using prerecorded trajectories, the possibility to track other insects such as fruit flies or mosquitoes. The lab-on-cables is relevant to free-flight studies and may be used in combination with stimulus delivery to assess sensory modulation of flight behavior (e.g., pheromone-controlled anemotaxis in moths).

Reconstruction of Three-Dimensional Trajectories of Honeybees Flying in High-Density Aerial Environments

“…Researchers have also developed tracking algorithms to reconstruct trajectories of freely flying Drosophila in virtual reality (VR) based systems 28–30 . In a recent study, Pannequin et al 31 used a SpiderCam 32 setup, referred to as a ‘lab on cables’, to track the flight of a single freely flying moth. Most techniques track the approximate 3D position of the centre of gravity (CG) of the whole insect from each stereo pair by computing the CG of the pixels representing the insect in each camera image 20,33–35 .…”

“…In practice, however, it is a challenge to track and accurately reconstruct the head and tail positions accurately and unambiguously from each pair of video frames, without any markers on the insect, especially when multiple insects are being filmed. Most of the studies conducted so far suffer from both of the following shortcomings: (a) usage of bulky and costly experimental apparatus, setups and methods which cannot be extended to tracking multiple flying insects in an outdoor setting 23,28,30,31,36–38 , and (b) the final digitised data often does not provide information on body orientation of the insects (or birds) flying in the group 17,18,21,22,29 .…”

Design and implementation of a cable-driven parallel robot for additive manufacturing applications

“…The method by which the cable is fixed on the MPF depends mainly on the diameter and type of the cable. For applications with smaller cable diameters, the attachment to the platform is via a knot or the cable is crimped through a hole [12,29,39,40,33,50,59] (Figure 10 a). The hole can also be conical as for the MiniIPAnema [60] (Figure 10 b) to reduce shear stress.…”

Modeling and control strategy of a haptic interactive robot based on a cable-driven parallel mechanism

“…Compared with rigid parallel robots, a cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) is characterized by its light weight, large bearing capacity, fast speed, and rapid reconfiguration. Because of these advantages, many scholars have recognized the importance of CDPRs and have applied them to rehabilitation training robots (Hamida et al, 2021;Ghrairi et al, 2023;Chen et al, 2019;Duan et al, 2015), radio telescopes (Yao et al, 2010;Duan et al, 2011), force interactive robots (i.e., haptic interactive robots, HIRs) (Fortin-Côté et al, 2014;Meziane et al, 2018), camera robots (Pannequin et al, 2020), handling robots (Gosselin, 2014;Lu et al, 2017), and three-dimensional (3D) printing mechanisms (Amare et al, 2019;Qian et al, 2020;Zi et al, 2019). The application of the above CDPR adopts the method of winding the drum with the cable.…”