  There exists an urgent need for efficient tools in disease surveillance to
help model and predict the spread of disease. The transmission of insect-borne
diseases poses a serious concern to public health officials and the medical and
research community at large. In the modeling of this spread, we face
bottlenecks in (1) the frequency at which we are able to sample insect vectors
in environments that are prone to propagating disease, (2) manual labor needed
to set up and retrieve surveillance devices like traps, and (3) the return time
in analyzing insect samples and determining if an infectious disease is
spreading in a region. To help address these bottlenecks, we present in this
paper the design, fabrication, and testing of a novel automated insect capture
module (ICM) or trap that aims to improve the rate of transferring samples
collected from the environment via aerial robots. The ICM features an
ultraviolet light attractant, passive capture mechanism, panels which can open
and close for access to insects, and a small onboard computer for automated
operation and data logging. At the same time, the ICM is designed to be
accessible; it is small-scale, lightweight and low-cost, and can be integrated
with commercially available aerial robots. Indoor and outdoor experimentation
validates ICM's feasibility in insect capturing and safe transportation. The
device can help bring us one step closer toward achieving fully autonomous and
scalable epidemiology by leveraging autonomous robots technology to aid the
medical and research community.
