Moving pattern of Zophobas beetle through physical stimulation at elytra

• Main Author: Tan, Pak Zan
• Other Authors: Hirotaka Sato
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/77899
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This project aims to provide necessary information about the movement path of a beetle when encountering obstacles in different directions. This information will be useful for researchers to create a walking Cyborg Beetle with a better navigation system. This project contains a literature review, setup and development of workstation, experiment procedure, analysis on the physical stimulation on the beetle and future research and study. In this project, Zophobas beetle was used as the primary subject for the experiment. An in-depth workstation was designed and developed to provide the best environment for data collection. After that, the movement of the beetle was collected by physically stimulating different parts of the beetle at a frequency of 6.67 Hz and amplitude of 1cm using a linear actuator. The movement data collected was further analysed to explain the behaviour of the beetle. The experimental result shows that Zophobas beetle always moves forward regardless of the direction of the stimulation. However, its tendency to performing a sideways movement highly depends on the direction of the stimulation. Also, the acceleration of the beetle in moving forward is 3 times faster than moving sideways.