RITA’s not afraid to get her hands dirty

RITA is one of the most dedicated workers at New Mexico State University’s Biological Control Laboratory. She’s already at the lab when others show up in the morning, and there when they leave at night.

That’s because RITA, or Robotic Information Technology Agent, is actually a robot arm. She does the jobs others don’t want to do. Her specialty is sorting and counting bugs.

Currently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture pays human beings to sort and count thousands of insects collected in traps at national forests. They hope to save trees by finding dangerous new species of bark beetles before they become a problem. It’s an important job but digging through a bucket of bugs is long, tedious and less than glamorous. It’s a job RITA could soon take over.

“It takes a person a week to go through those traps. RITA can do that same work in about an hour, saving time and money,” said Jeff Drake, an affiliated NMSU faculty member and RITA’s designer.

The system uses two digital video cameras to “see” bugs laid out on a glass sorting tray. The camera’s images are then sent to a computer that recognizes unique features on the insects and tells RITA how to sort them. A small suction cup on the end of RITA’s arm then picks up the insects and drops them into individual cups.

RITA can already recognize 30 different insect classifications. If she finds something she doesn’t recognize, she can show it to a taxonomist anywhere in the country via the Internet for identification.

In the future, Drake plans to add more cameras, measuring infrared and ultraviolet light. This will give the system more functionality and let the computer get a better look at insects in need of identification.

Once RITA is perfected, Drake envisions more being built and set up in central locations around the country for the USDA and other agencies, streamlining the process and leaving bug-counting humans free to do other, less icky jobs.