Leveraging Honey Bees as Bio-Cyber Physical Systems

The goal of this project is to leverage and improve upon the capabilities of honey bees as agricultural pollinators by incorporating them into Bio-Cyber Physical sistems. Rapid advances are needed to aid a dwindling agricultural, increase crop yield to sustain the growing population, and provide targeted crop care to limit the need for broad pesticide treatments. These challenges may well be addressed by autonomous mobile robots and sensor networks; unfortunately, agricultural landscapes represent vast, complex, and dynamic environments that complicate long term operation. In contrast, social insects are capable of robust sustained operation in unpredictable environments far beyond what is possible with state-of-the-art artificial systems. Colonies of honey bees are of particular interest, because they are the premiere agricultural pollinator bringing in over $150 billion annually. A colony causes pollination by dispatching tens of thousands of scouts and foragers to survey and sample kilometer-wide areas around their hive. Thus, the colony as a whole accumulates vast information about bust and bloom in the local agricultural landscape -- information that would be very helpful to farmers and beekeepers.

To harness the capabilities of a bee colony while still providing control and sensing, the proposed work specifically involves 1) novel submillimeter flight recorders with visual scene capture and analysis, thermal and mechanical sensors, a clock, storage, processing, photovoltaic chargers and short range communications; 2) algorithms and models to estimate foraging maps, relying on bee motion models and feature extraction, merging probability density functions of observed landmarks from thousands of flights; and 3) feedback control via a bee-mimicking shaker device to recruit foragers, in turn eliciting data collection and pollination, e.g. during brief spouts of bloom that would otherwise go unnoticed by the colony. This research represents a transformative step towards a new frontier in Bio-Cyber Physical Systems, improving upon the abilities of social insects to sense and interact with the physical world, while providing data acquisition and control on par with explicitly engineered systems.

Over the past year, we have achieved progress along four major avenues related to 1) stand-alone, millimeter-sized flight recorders, specifically a prototype for flight timing, complete with power and data interrogator; 2) a sensor calibration rig with full spherical sweep; 3) a bee-mimicking DJI quadcopter; and 4) bee-mimicking shaker devices and comb sensors for recording, classifying, and replicating vibro-tactile signals in the hive. We have set up observation hives and honey bee colonies, and done exploratory flight recordings using computer vision in the field, to inform second and third year computations of foraging probability maps. To further support future flight-recorder experiments, we have developed special entrances that guide ingoing and outgoing bees to a single-file, single-directional paths, which will ease automated monitoring of forager activity.