DART
Auto-tracking high-speed camera for motion-capture labs
DART started in a motion-capture lab at Imperial College London. The lab studied insect flight, and insects move far too fast for anyone to keep a high-speed lens trained on them by hand. The footage you need is usually gone before the operator can react. DART reads a live motion-capture stream and re-aims the camera itself. A two-mirror optical path steers the line of sight at up to 500 Hz and holds a fast, unpredictable subject centred and in focus for the whole capture. It's now the product I'm building at Averon Scientific.
What it does
- A two-mirror steering system reorients the line of sight at up to 500 Hz, resolving to 0.176°, with focus that adapts continuously through the recording.
- Plugs into the motion-capture system a lab already runs (OptiTrack, Vicon or Qualisys) over the local network. Pick a tracked body or marker set and DART follows it. A one-time calibration aligns it to the capture volume.
- Built to order around the imaging sensor and optics each experiment needs, with full camera-parameter access as standard.
- Ships with control software for macOS, Windows and Linux: one app for calibration, tracking setup, capture, playback, and exporting footage and tracking data together.
How it works
The problem
A lot of high-speed science happens once and won't repeat, with subjects that won't hold still: insect flight, animal behaviour, sports biomechanics. A person can't keep a narrow, high-magnification lens on a target moving that fast, so the frames that matter land out of frame or out of focus. DART is built for the captures you only get one attempt at.
How it works
The control software subscribes to the lab's live motion-capture feed. After a one-time calibration to the capture volume, it knows where the chosen subject is in real time. It drives a two-mirror optical path that repositions the line of sight at up to 500 Hz while focus tracks continuously, so the framing you set holds for the whole recording rather than only the parts an operator could anticipate.
Proof: a flapping wing in flight
A flapping-wing drone doesn't fly on rigid wings. Each wing bends and twists through its stroke, and that deformation is much of how it makes lift. Recovering the true shape needs footage fast enough to freeze the stroke and locked onto a wing that drifts around the flight volume. DART kept the wing centred and sharp through a recording at over 200 fps. Every beat landed in frame and large enough to reconstruct the wing surface in 3-D from the tracked dot-grid.
My role
I'm an engineering co-founder. My work covers the opto-mechanical design and CAD of the steering head and enclosure, the mechatronics and real-time control behind the 500 Hz / 0.176° aiming, and the desktop control software that ties calibration, tracking, capture and export into one cross-platform workflow.