Our revolutionary, new High Speed Photogrammetry system has allowed us to explore a limitless number of new areas. The most important component of our high-speed photogrammetry system is the cameras themselves. We use 3 High-speed Cameras aligned along the principle coordinate axes (Figure 2). For our system, we chose the Photron Fastcam SA3 60k model. The system is capable of capturing a maximum of 1000 black and white frames per second at full resolution (1024×1024) with a global shutter speed of 2 us. With 4 Gb of onboard storage, this stand-alone, network-attached camera system allows for a maximum continuous record time, at optimum settings, of 2.726 seconds.

Our current and most prevalent application for our system is in the field of insect flight, particularly: insects in free flight. Our arrangement of cameras allows for true, untethered flight within the visual domain. From this, we are able to track real-world body coordinates of the flying subjects. With this high-fidelity data, we are able to use our in-house physics based analysis to explore the various aspects that allow for the interesting flight dynamics of natures smallest flying creatures. While this application is our current topic of interest, we are also using the cameras for various kinematic data collection applications such as MAV studies and other various mechanical systems.