Have you ever wondered where bugs play or how a bug looks at you when you’re looking at it? Well, wonder no more, as researchers from the University of Washington have developed a tiny camera system that’s so light it can sit on a beetle’s back, like a backpack. The camera can be wirelessly controlled via Bluetooth to focus on different targets and stream photos and videos back to the phone.
The camera specs are not impressive: resolution is 160×120 pixels, images are shot in black and white, and video is streamed at between one and five frames per second. However, these trade-offs were the only way the team could shrink the camera system down and the weight to just 248 milligrams, to accommodate the beetle.
Shyam Gollakota, the study’s senior author, said:
We have created a low-power, low-weight, wireless camera system that can capture a first-person view of what’s happening from an actual live insect or create a vision for small robots. Vision is so important for communication and navigation, but it’s extremely challenging to do it on such a small scale. As a result, prior to our work, a wireless vision has not been possible for small robots or insects.
The team was inspired by the way insects naturally make trade-offs for efficiency at their small size. Bugs have wide-angle high-definition visual processing, with only a tiny part of their eyes that can see in high-resolution. Therefore, if they want to see a target in high-res, they need to turn their heads to point it at the desired location.
The researchers attached the tiny camera to a mechanical arm that can rotate 60 degrees. The arm, which runs on minimum energy, is made of a material that curves to different angles when jolted with a bit of electricity. Each time the arm rotates, it holds that position for about 60 seconds before moving back to its original position of face forward. This allows the camera to track moving objects or snap panoramas.
For the study, published in the journal Science Robotics, the team tested the new camera setup on both live beetles and mini insect robots of their creation.
With the live bugs, the researchers were able to capture ‘a day in the life of a beetle.’ The camera could be connected to an accelerometer that only turns it on when the beetle is moving or left recording non-stop. In the first trial, the battery lasted one to two hours, while in the second, the battery lasted up to six hours. Meanwhile, the robot would stop to snap photos and had a battery life of about 90 minutes. It used vibrations to move between 2 and 3 cm per second.
This tiny camera backpack for bugs could potentially be used to better study insects or for small robots that could crawl into small, unreachable places.
