Photo: Kunai Kalra | Unsplash
Austrian biologist Thomas Schmickl calls his work at the Artificial Life Lab at the University of Graz ‘ecosystem hacking’ because using robots to help out bees and other pollinators could strengthen entire ecosystems. As part of a European Union–funded project called Hiveopolis, his team is using sustainable materials to make prototype hives outfitted with sensors and cameras and devices that can create vibration inside the hive, which slows the bees down, and adjust temperature or air flow, which encourages them to move away. Hiveopolis collaborator Tim Landgraf, a professor of artificial and collective intelligence at Freie Universität Berlin, is getting ready to test an improved version of a robotic dancing bee to see if it can guide honeybees to a food source. Through another EU project called RoboRoyale, Schmickl and others hope to use robotic bees to influence the queen and thus improve the fitness of the whole colony.“Humans are waking up to how important nature is,” Landgraf says. Technology “should be an interface that augments our and nature’s capabilities.”
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