Author Topic: Radar to detect mosquitoes?  (Read 12966 times)

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Offline PartialDischargeTopic starter

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Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« on: July 30, 2020, 08:19:46 am »
Hypothetically speaking, what kind of radar (frequency, size, antenna type...) would work in detecting and tracking a mosquito flying in a medium sized room (5x5m for example).
Mosquitoes do not fly fast but are tiny, yet bats detect them with ultrasounds (100-300kHz). I wonder if ultrasounds would work or some GHz radar would be needed to detect and track its position.
To avoid mechanical movements I guess an active phased array would be most suited for this application.

Again this is just a hypothetical discussion of possible approaches to detect and track the position of such unwelcome creatures.
 

Offline OM222O

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #1 on: July 30, 2020, 08:33:56 am »
if you want to use radar to detect them, you need them to be at minimum half the wavelenght but that doesn't produce very reliable detection method. Ideally they're one full wavelenght. I'm too lazy to calculate but that seems way too high to be actually doable (for a cheap DIY method that is, ofc you can build a whole radio tower for the application if you're rich).

For the ultrasonic idea: won't work. I'm not sure how bats do it but if you have ever used an ultrasonic sensor, you'd know how inaccurate their beams are.
 

Online magic

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #2 on: July 30, 2020, 08:38:18 am »
No radar expert here, but the speed of light is about million times higher than the speed of sound in the air, so you will need a million times higher frequency to achieve the same wavelength and, presumably, resolution.
 

Online Berni

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #3 on: July 30, 2020, 10:16:48 am »
As others said you need the wavelength to be about as small as what you are trying to see. So about 100GHz gives you 3mm wavelength and an antenna that is about half that size.

Good luck building that.
 

Offline chickenHeadKnob

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #4 on: July 30, 2020, 11:02:25 am »
The simplest and lowest cost is to mimic the way humans trying to sleep in a tent detect them. Have an array  of three or more sensitive microphones detect the buzzing of their flight and triangulate with some audio frequency DSP.
 
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Offline RoGeorge

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #5 on: July 30, 2020, 11:10:21 am »
Meanwhile, 10 years ago



 :D

Offline Domagoj T

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #6 on: July 30, 2020, 11:11:12 am »
As others said you need the wavelength to be about as small as what you are trying to see. So about 100GHz gives you 3mm wavelength and an antenna that is about half that size.

Good luck building that.
Just go a few orders of magnitude faster and get an off the shelf solution - a camera.

edit:
30 seconds too late.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #7 on: July 30, 2020, 11:11:43 am »
As others said you need the wavelength to be about as small as what you are trying to see. So about 100GHz gives you 3mm wavelength and an antenna that is about half that size.

Good luck building that.

Hams make contacts of multiple kilometres on 122 GHz.
 
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Offline PartialDischargeTopic starter

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #8 on: July 30, 2020, 11:15:02 am »
Meanwhile, 10 years ago

 :D

Good system, although I don't think it has been developed. However the idea of using a light mesh is also valid to detect 'intruders'
 

Offline PartialDischargeTopic starter

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #9 on: July 30, 2020, 11:21:15 am »
Hams make contacts of multiple kilometres on 122 GHz.


"The current world distance record on the 2.5 mm band was 132 kilometres (82 mi) set by Austrian stations OE5VRL and OE3WOG on October 19, 2013"

Wow
 

Offline RoGeorge

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #10 on: July 30, 2020, 12:04:08 pm »
Meanwhile, 10 years ago

 :D

Good system, although I don't think it has been developed. However the idea of using a light mesh is also valid to detect 'intruders'

I think it was developed already, but for some reason it was not practical.  I remember seeing a video (not sure if it was from the same company) where in a window frame there was a setup with some mosquito detector (again, don't recall if it was radar or video detection), then burning down the mosquito with an automatically aimed LASER.

However, since 10 years later we still don't have this, might seem it was not very reliable, or maybe it was too expensive when compared with chemical solutions.

Another anti mosquito method I remember was to release a huge number of sterile male mosquitoes in the wild, male mosquitoes that were sterilized by a lab (sterile as in not been able to impregnate the mosquitoes females, therefore not being able to reproduce).  The sterilized mosquitoes were supposed to compete with the fertile male mosquitoes already existing in the wild (and they did compete), therefore the total number of mosquitoes offspring will drop.  And they did.  It's a method already practiced in some places of the world, AFAIK.

Online Berni

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #11 on: July 30, 2020, 12:38:34 pm »
Another way to stop them from getting trough a window is to simply put a bug mesh over the window. Cheap, simple, reliable.
 

Offline mrflibble

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #12 on: July 30, 2020, 01:08:59 pm »
Another way to stop them from getting trough a window is to simply put a bug mesh over the window. Cheap, simple, reliable.
Or just nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

And on the off chance that your nuclear stockpile is running a little low, like RoGeorge I also recall an older system using cameras for detection and lasers to zap those pesky mosquitoes out of the air.

https://youtu.be/fH_x3kpG8Z4?t=30
 
 

Offline radar_macgyver

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #13 on: July 30, 2020, 01:41:04 pm »
Sticking to monostatic radar, you'd be limited more by antenna directivity than the fact that they're smaller than the wavelength; weather radar operating at 2.8 GHz can easily detect insects up to about 10 km. Rayleigh scattering allows you to detect particles much smaller than lambda.

https://www.radartutorial.eu/01.basics/Rayleigh-%20versus%20Mie-Scattering.en.html

However, to get a reasonable angular resolution (let's say, 10 degrees), one would need a ~1 meter diameter aperture - not exactly practical. Going to 60 GHz, you would only need a 5 cm aperture (at which point the approximations I used for beamwidth would likely fall apart). By sampling at a higher resolution than the beamwidth, one could fit a gaussian and get a better estimate of the target position in azimuth.

60 GHz parts are getting affordable, but phased arrays at those bands are still Bell-labs type stuff; I think they were able to demonstrate a TX array at 94 GHz a couple of years ago. You can buy a 28 GHz dev kit with 256 elements from Anokiwave/Ball Aerospace.

Finally, the really hard part would be figuring out how to reject multipath from the walls, roof, furniture, etc. Depending on mosquito density, living inside an anechoic chamber may not be too much of a compromise ;D
 
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Offline atmfjstc

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #14 on: July 30, 2020, 02:45:33 pm »
Seems to me more practical to detect them by triangulating their "regular" (i.e. non-ultrasonic) sound emissions.

Just imagine the satisfaction of trying to go to sleep in your room and hearing:

"buzzzzzzzzzzz.... KKERZAAP!!  *dead silence*"
 

Offline phil from seattle

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #15 on: July 30, 2020, 03:44:46 pm »
Meanwhile, 10 years ago



 :D

Yeah, that was Nathan Myrvold's "SDI for mosquitos".  Complete blather.  Especially since the intent was to protect people in the malarial zones - people that can barely afford running water.  This was from the same outfit that wanted to solve global warming by lofting some sort of dust into near-space and reduce hurricane season with evaporative coolers in the Gulf of Mexico.  All thought, no action and zero consideration for unintended consequences. Though, they did file a few patent claims. 

And while we are at it, the company should have been named Intellectual Vultures, not Intellectual Ventures. But that is the subject of a different rant.
 
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Offline janoc

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #16 on: July 30, 2020, 04:04:43 pm »
As others said you need the wavelength to be about as small as what you are trying to see. So about 100GHz gives you 3mm wavelength and an antenna that is about half that size.

Good luck building that.
Just go a few orders of magnitude faster and get an off the shelf solution - a camera.

edit:
30 seconds too late.

Given the size of a mosquito and the speed with which it moves, that would have to be one heck of a camera to be able to pick them up, especially at a distance of a few meters.

 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #17 on: July 30, 2020, 04:36:43 pm »
Seems to me more practical to detect them by triangulating their "regular" (i.e. non-ultrasonic) sound emissions.

Yep, that's likely to be much easier to implement. Whereas it could be relatively straightforward (with an array of sufficiently sensitive microphones) with just ONE mosquito, being able to track down several mosquitoes in the same area this way would get rather hairy. I guess you could resort to some kind of ICA, but if you add various ambient noises on top of that, not sure how accurate that could be. Now the OP kind of talked about one mosquito, so if there is only one in the room, that could be doable.

Forget about video IMO. Not only do they fly too fast, but you'd need an array of cameras to cover the whole space, with proper focusing so that you could at least identify the location in real time (for very tiny beasts, you'd need a rather good focus). Yeah.

Short of doing some research about how mosquitoes fly, I'm not sure I see the point though. What are you going to gain knowing exactly where a given mosquito is in a room in real time?

 

Online magic

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #18 on: July 30, 2020, 05:07:21 pm »
Yeah, that was Nathan Myrvold's "SDI for mosquitos".  Complete blather.  Especially since the intent was to protect people in the malarial zones - people that can barely afford running water.  This was from the same outfit that wanted to solve global warming by lofting some sort of dust into near-space and reduce hurricane season with evaporative coolers in the Gulf of Mexico.  All thought, no action and zero consideration for unintended consequences. Though, they did file a few patent claims. 

And while we are at it, the company should have been named Intellectual Vultures, not Intellectual Ventures. But that is the subject of a different rant.
The malaria thing was to gain press coverage and it worked because you are talking about it.
The patent thing was to earn money if somebody tries to actually build it and sell in the West.

Never take anything coming from America at face value :P
 

Offline duak

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #19 on: July 31, 2020, 03:05:47 am »
Since doppler radar detects masses of things that are individually smaller than the wavelength as well as detecting things that are moving, I googled "doppler lidar insect detection" and got quite a few hits.  Here's one: https://cosmosmagazine.com/uncategorized/mosquitoes-are-really-on-the-radar/  They were able to detect and count insects and classify them based on their wing beat rate.   I'd expect the wavelength of illuminating source to be somewhere in the range of near IR (> 1000 nm) to near UV (>350 nm), basically the visible light spectrum plus a bit.

I see that most of the papers are from the past ten years or so and are of academic interest, so I would expect development of the techniques are still being worked out.  I'd expect that as soon as someone with money needs to track individuals, someone will work out the optics, sensors and the DSP to do it.
 

Offline ahbushnell

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #20 on: July 31, 2020, 03:37:53 am »
Good luck building that.
Who said I’m building anything?

I’d like to point out for the third time the pure theoretical and idea gathering nature of this thread, if someone feels triggered or offended by the idea please just skip it
Touchy today.
 

Offline PartialDischargeTopic starter

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #21 on: July 31, 2020, 04:34:15 am »
Since doppler radar detects masses of things that are individually smaller than the wavelength as well as detecting things that are moving, I googled "doppler lidar insect detection" and got quite a few hits.  Here's one: https://cosmosmagazine.com/uncategorized/mosquitoes-are-really-on-the-radar/  They were able to detect and count insects and classify them based on their wing beat rate.   I'd expect the wavelength of illuminating source to be somewhere in the range of near IR (> 1000 nm) to near UV (>350 nm), basically the visible light spectrum plus a bit.
Pretty interesting
 

Offline phil from seattle

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #22 on: July 31, 2020, 04:50:00 am »
Yeah, that was Nathan Myrvold's "SDI for mosquitos".  Complete blather.  Especially since the intent was to protect people in the malarial zones - people that can barely afford running water.  This was from the same outfit that wanted to solve global warming by lofting some sort of dust into near-space and reduce hurricane season with evaporative coolers in the Gulf of Mexico.  All thought, no action and zero consideration for unintended consequences. Though, they did file a few patent claims. 

And while we are at it, the company should have been named Intellectual Vultures, not Intellectual Ventures. But that is the subject of a different rant.
The malaria thing was to gain press coverage and it worked because you are talking about it.
The patent thing was to earn money if somebody tries to actually build it and sell in the West.

Never take anything coming from America at face value :P

No, they really thought they would be conquering malaria.  I know several people involved. And the patents, maybe.

But on your last point, I've edited it to make it more realistic: Never take anything coming from America at facevalue
 

Offline elektrolitr

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #23 on: July 31, 2020, 07:21:30 am »
Hawk-Eye system used in tennis etc is said to be accurate to <4mm and is using only high-speed cameras and image processing. I think that tracking a tennis ball in a court is the same order of difficulty as tracking a mosquito in a regular size room.
The key difference would be that a ball has already a contrasting color. But, if one can't paint mosquitos, there is always option to paint the room!
 

Offline MosherIV

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Re: Radar to detect mosquitoes?
« Reply #24 on: July 31, 2020, 07:39:59 am »
Triangulating sound method works for a single target.
I doubt it would work if there are a number of mosquitoes in the room.
 


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