A robotic system for researching social integration in honeybees

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel robotic system developed for researching collective social mechanisms in a biohybrid society of robots and honeybees. The potential for distributed coordination, as observed in nature in many different animal species, has caused an increased interest in collective behaviour research in recent years because of its applicability to a broad spectrum of technical systems requiring robust multi-agent control. One of the main problems is understanding the mechanisms driving the emergence of collective behaviour of social animals. With the aim of deepening the knowledge in this field, we have designed a multi-robot system capable of interacting with honeybees within an experimental arena. The final product, stationary autonomous robot units, designed by specificaly considering the physical, sensorimotor and behavioral characteristics of the honeybees (lat. Apis mallifera), are equipped with sensing, actuating, computation, and communication capabilities that enable the measurement of relevant environmental states, such as honeybee presence, and adequate response to the measurements by generating heat, vibration and airflow. The coordination among robots in the developed system is established using distributed controllers. The cooperation between the two different types of collective systems is realized by means of a consensus algorithm, enabling the honeybees and the robots to achieve a common objective. Presented results, obtained within ASSISIbf project, show successful cooperation indicating its potential for future applications.

Interactive biorobotics

“…As stressed before, it is not claimed here that the interactive stimulation methodology is the only possible methodology involving interactive robots in animal research. However, several additional examples can be found in the recent literature on the behaviour of honeybees (Griparić et al, 2017), fish (Landgraf et al, 2016;Romano et al, 2017), and chickens (Gribovskiy et al, 2010): for a state of the art, see (Krause et al, 2011;Romano et al, 2019).…”

Social Integrating Robots Suggest Mitigation Strategies for Ecosystem Decay

“…Second, the robots may be distributed as an array of sensor–actuator nodes that can sense and locally act, but do not themselves locomote; see Figure 3B . We call such sensor–actuator nodes combined actuator sensor units (CASUs), as they are described in Schmickl et al (2013) and Griparić et al (2017) . Experiments with static arrays of CASUs were performed by modulating honeybee aggregations (e.g., Stefanec et al, 2017a ; Mariano et al, 2018 ) and by guiding plant growth ( Wahby et al, 2018 ).…”

The Logic of Interactive Biorobotics

“…where P R (“P” for parameter and “R” for robot) is the set of parameters pr 1 , …, pr n defining the relevant aspects of the robot (e.g., appearance and motion). Other proximal studies are, for example, (Abaid et al, 2012 ; Polverino and Porfiri, 2013b ; Jolly et al, 2016 ; Griparić et al, 2017 ; Bierbach et al, 2018 ). All these studies had the long-term goal of understanding the dynamics of animal-animal interaction but tested a more specific hypothesis on how animals react to a robot.…”