RapidAIM

Smart Trap

Australia's isolation is both benefit and curse from our agricultural economy. One of the greatest threats and challenges to our agricultural food production industry is bio-security, Pest detection and proactive -pest management. RapidAIM’s Smart Trap negates these challenges and takes the guess work out of pest surveillance. The trap remotely, actively and effectively detects fruit flies early in their life-cycle allowing advanced pest management to take place whilst risk reducing the above disasters. The RapidAIM Smart Trap represents a world first in IoT bio-security pest sensing and management. 

CDG Scope of Work

Industrial design, project management, new product development, prototype manufacturing management, mass production supply chain management.

About RapidAIM

RapidAIM are a team of scientists and engineers with a deep tech and agricultural background and a vision for the future. RapidAIM is on a mission to reduce the chemical intensity of agriculture by taking the guesswork out of pest management. Dr Nancy Schellhorn is the co-founder, co-inventor and CEO of RapidAIM bio-digital crop protection.

A Fly In The Orchid

Traditional fruit fly pest detection involves manual, expensive and inefficient baited trap inspections and reporting by farm labourers/agronomists. This process causes delays, risks outbreaks and damage to valuable produce markets. Fruit flies are highly mobile, breed quickly and females can inject hundreds of eggs a day into fruit. Larvae emerge and cause damage by living and feeding within the fruit, which may appear intact from the outside. 

Industrial Design

The exterior form was driven by the functional behaviour science requirements of trapping fruit flies and in field operator usability: 

• Concave fruit shaped surfaces (flies like to crawl around and explore this shape)

• Bright yellow (wavelength specific) end-caps scientifically proven to attract fruit flies

• Clear body enclosures encourage light to fill the central section between the tunnel fly sensors encouraging the fly to move across the sensor towards the light and into the containment cavity

• Clear body also facilitates external visual audits of catch without needing to access the lure chamber. 

Smart Trap, Smart App

RapidAIM’s Smart Traps sensors are deployed on a grid array network across a fruit-producing region. The Smart Trap combines RapidAIM’s deep knowledge of insect behaviour with a proprietary hardware and software sensor technology inside the trap to detect, identify and audit incoming insects. Alert/notification data is then transmitted over an ultra low power radio network to cloud base stations. Cloud storage data is then on forwarded to the growers phone in a convenient to access and easy use and RapidAIM App Dashboard. With RapidAIM deployment traditional pest surveillance and management risks and costs are significantly reduced.

Built To Last

Unlike the traditional disposable single grow-season products, the RapidAIM product needed to be manufactured from high quality outdoor rated robust materials. Interestingly the flies unexpected interest in parting lines drove the fit and finish standards of the product to much higher levels than previously considered. Environmentally speaking fit and finish was also important as the product needed to protect itself form water and bad weather ingress and UV degradation. Herbicides and pesticides are also ever present in the Smart Traps’ environment necessitating the use of engineering grade chemically resistant materials.