{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/millisecond-insect-tracking-system","title":"Millisecond insect tracking system","arxiv_id":"2002.12100","date":"2020-02-27","proceeding":null,"authors":[],"abstract":"Animals such as insects have provided a rich source of inspiration for\ndesigning robots. For example, animals navigate to goals via efficient\ncoordination of individual motor actions, and demonstrate natural solutions to\nproblems also faced by engineers. Recording individual body part positions\nduring large scale movement would therefore be useful. Such multi-scale\nobservations, however, are challenging. With video, for example, there is\ntypically a trade-off between the volume over which an animal can be recorded\nand spatial resolution within the volume. Even with high pixel-count cameras,\nmotion blur can be a challenge when using available light. Here we present a\nnew approach for tracking animals, such as insects, with an optical system that\nbypasses this tradeoff by actively pointing a telephoto video camera at the\nanimal. This system is based around high-speed pan-tilt mirrors which steer an\noptical path shared by a quadrant photodiode and a high-resolution, high-speed\ntelephoto video recording system. The mirror is directed to lock on to the\nimage of a 25-milligram retroreflector worn by the animal. This system allows\nhigh-magnification videography with reduced motion blur over a large tracking\nvolume. With our prototype, we obtained millisecond order closed-loop latency\nand recorded videos of flying insects in a tracking volume extending to an\naxial distance of 3 meters and horizontally and vertically by 40 degrees. The\nsystem offers increased capabilities compared to other video recording\nsolutions and may be useful for the study of animal behavior and the design of\nbio-inspired robots.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/2002.12100v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.12100v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"millisecond-insect-tracking-system","repo_url":"https://github.com/strawlab/msectrax","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"navigate","task_name":"Navigate"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}