Towards End-to-End Automatic Insect Handling and Insect Scanning

Digitisation of physical insect collections in the world is essential to understanding the biodiversity, and creating digital duplicates in 3D that can be easily shared with scientists and public users. This paper presents a fully automatic system for fast digitising large insect collections. The focus is on automating both insect handling and insect scanning to perform whole-drawer 3D reconstruction of all specimens in an insect tray. Though existing approaches have worked on automating insect scanning, those methods often overlook automatic insect handling. Current insect handling generally involves trained manual labour and is time-consuming. To resolve this issue, we propose to use a robot arm that can perform the insect handling efficiently with high repeatability. In our approach, insects are automatically localised, grasped, scanned, and reconstructed in 3D using the cameras with the robot arm. This results in scalable high-throughput automated system that is capable of handling multiple trays of insects. Our system is generalizable and can be used to digitise other types of physical collections by just replacing the collection-specific object detector in our pipeline.