Posted: October 2, 2020
Our prototype non-lethal insect trap, developed in collaboration with Penn State’s Center for Pollinator Research, has successfully completed a month long deployment in Oregon.
A team of researchers led by Profs. Grozinger and Patch from Penn State's Center for Pollinator Research and Prof. Narayanan from School of EECS have been designing live insect traps to track pollinators in the wild. The new non-lethal automated insect monitoring systems to study pollinators is intended to provide new insights unavailable from the traditional monitoring of dead insects.
This summer a group of graduate students, Codey Mathis, Eric Homan and Chonghan Lee have designed and built a prototype non-lethal insect trap. This trap embeds various environmental sensors and multiple cameras to detect and identify live insects. After initial validation at Penn State locations, significant engineering design changes were made to the packaging, energy harvesting and battery systems for longer duration unattended deployments. Mathis successfully completed a month long deployment of the system in Oregon in August 2020. The researchers continue to add new automated features to detect and recognize pollinators.
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