Real-time Cricket Sorting By Sex
This addresses a practical bottleneck in cricket farming for sustainable protein production, though it appears incremental as an application of existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of automated sex-based sorting of house crickets for industrial insect farming by developing a low-cost real-time system combining computer vision and physical actuation, achieving 86.8% overall sorting accuracy in real-world experiments.
The global demand for sustainable protein sources is driving increasing interest in edible insects, with Acheta domesticus (house cricket) identified as one of the most suitable species for industrial production. Current farming practices typically rear crickets in mixed-sex populations without automated sex sorting, despite potential benefits such as selective breeding, optimized reproduction ratios, and nutritional differentiation. This work presents a low-cost, real-time system for automated sex-based sorting of Acheta domesticus, combining computer vision and physical actuation. The device integrates a Raspberry Pi 5 with the official Raspberry AI Camera and a custom YOLOv8 nano object detection model, together with a servo-actuated sorting arm. The model reached a mean Average Precision at IoU 0.5 (mAP@0.5) of 0.977 during testing, and real-world experiments with groups of crickets achieved an overall sorting accuracy of 86.8%. These results demonstrate the feasibility of deploying lightweight deep learning models on resource-constrained devices for insect farming applications, offering a practical solution to improve efficiency and sustainability in cricket production.