Location: Southern Insect Management Research
Project Number: 6066-22000-090-010-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Jul 1, 2021
End Date: Jun 30, 2025
Objective:
This project aims to develop an insect tracking system via the development of a small, lightweight sensor tag that can be attached to the insects to track their location wirelessly. Such tracing devices will help researchers obtain real-time information on the behavior of the insects at much greater accuracy and finer resolution than remote sensing. The concept of employing wireless sensors on insects is a comparatively unknown area, and that research proposed here can have vast applications in the future.
Approach:
In this project, the cooperator will focus on the design and development of a wireless insect sensor tag and the corresponding reader/monitoring station, and will demonstrate the connection of a small number of readers/monitoring stations to a single Zigbee node. The overall system will include a small and lightweight wireless sensor tag, a reader/monitoring station, and a Zigbee wireless network. The sensor tag will be attached to the insect, and a corresponding reader/monitoring station will detect the existence of the wireless tag. The reader will be connected to a Zigbee wireless networking node, so that when insects enter and exit the detection range of a reader, the reader identifies the insects via the wireless tag; and when the wireless tag is no longer in range, the Zigbee node sends a data packet indicating that the insect left the location. Multiple insects may enter one location at the same time, and this system can be designed to monitor the entry and exit of multiple insects.
