An Insect Flight Tracking And Measurement System Based On Magnetic Sensor Coils

The bionic study of insect flight is expected to provide new ideas for the design of micro air vehicle (MAV). Measuring the parameters of a free flying insect is very important to this research. However the conflict between the insect flight range and the observing resolution becomes a bottleneck for the further development of insect flight parameter measurement. Tracking methods are essential to solve this problem. In this thesis, an open-loop hybrid tracking and measurement system based on magnetic sensor coils is proposed. It can not only obtain high-resolution images of insect flight, but also conveniently measure the flight trajectory and body attitudes. In addition, this system makes it possible to track free flying insects by high-speed camera.The hybrid tracking and measurement system consists of a magnetic sensor coil measurement system and an image tracking system. In the measurement system, the electric current flowing through copper wires of magnetic sensor coil generates a unique distribution of alternating magnetic field within a cubic box. The insect carries the miniature sensor coils and flies in the cubic box. Then the magnetic field induces voltage signals in these coils. The signals are passed on to a set of weak-signal processing circuits and then sent to computer through A/D card. The computer can determine the insect's body position and attitudes using the appropiate algorithms. According to the body position, the image tracking system outputs proper controlling signal and drives a two-dimensional rotating mirror through servo control units, so that a fixed CCD camera can track the insect and capture its flight images via rotating the mirror. This hybrid tracking and measurement system does not need to extract any information from images, allowing the camera to film freely. The system also has the open-loop characteristic, which means that even if the object is temporarily out of view the camera can quickly recapture the object.We made tracking experiments on bumblebees. The bumblebee was...