Bee behavior suggests biologically inspired designs for robots and computers.
December 11, 2003 | Source: KurzweilAI
Georgia Tech researchers are gathering data on the behavior of bees and ants using a computer vision system that can recognize which marked bee is doing which job. The research could have implications for biologically inspired design of robots and computers.
Tracked bees could help design robots and computers
“Potentially, we could videotape ants for a long period of time, learn their ‘program’ and run it on a robot,” said Tucker Balch, assistant professor of computing. Social insect behavior can offer ideas on how to organize a cooperating colony of robots capable of complex operations, he believes.
Balch’s team developed a computer vision system to analyze data on the sequential movements that encode information — for example in bees, the location of distant food sources.