Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RoboRoyale (ROBOtic Replicants for Optimizing the Yield by Augmenting Living Ecosystems)
Reporting period: 2022-11-01 to 2024-02-29
Earth's ecosystems are rapidly losing species diversity and abundance, particularly affecting insects, critical for pollination and ecosystem stability. The Western honeybee, a key pollinator, sustains a significant portion of the human diet and holds considerable economic importance.
RoboRoyale is developing and combining micro-robotic and biological technologies into a system that can support the well-being of the honeybee queen, which is responsible for the reproductive success and efficiency of a colony. We aim to develop a minimally invasive approach to affect a honeybee colony in a positive, supportive way, such as regulating and enhancing the egg-laying activity of a honeybee queen by supplementing her court with a multi-robotic system that interacts with the queen. The bio-hybrid system will serve as an important scientific tool to study honeybee biology, support colony health and efficiency, and provide a stabilizing factor in the surrounding ecosystem. In addition, demonstrating that we can positively impact large-scale ecosystems by using microrobots to affect one single living organism will provide radical new insights into the new possibilities of bio-hybrid technology. The potential impact of the project will lead to foundational scientific and biotechnological approaches to synthesize symbiotic super-organisms of cooperating robots and animals.
The main objectives of the project are:
-To investigate how to improve the efficiency, welfare, reproductive rate, and health of a honeybee colony by regulating the behavioUrs of its queen.
-Developing bee-sized, bio-compatible robots capable of fostering successful colony-sustaining interactions with honeybee queens, a vital and highly sensitive animal that requires constant care.
-To raise awareness among public and industrial stakeholders about the potential of high-tech to transform outdated low-tech agriculture and livestock management practices, thus fostering a sustainable service industry rooted in bio-hybrid technology.
RoboRoyale is developing and combining micro-robotic and biological technologies into a system that can support the well-being of the honeybee queen, which is responsible for the reproductive success and efficiency of a colony. We aim to develop a minimally invasive approach to affect a honeybee colony in a positive, supportive way, such as regulating and enhancing the egg-laying activity of a honeybee queen by supplementing her court with a multi-robotic system that interacts with the queen. The bio-hybrid system will serve as an important scientific tool to study honeybee biology, support colony health and efficiency, and provide a stabilizing factor in the surrounding ecosystem. In addition, demonstrating that we can positively impact large-scale ecosystems by using microrobots to affect one single living organism will provide radical new insights into the new possibilities of bio-hybrid technology. The potential impact of the project will lead to foundational scientific and biotechnological approaches to synthesize symbiotic super-organisms of cooperating robots and animals.
The main objectives of the project are:
-To investigate how to improve the efficiency, welfare, reproductive rate, and health of a honeybee colony by regulating the behavioUrs of its queen.
-Developing bee-sized, bio-compatible robots capable of fostering successful colony-sustaining interactions with honeybee queens, a vital and highly sensitive animal that requires constant care.
-To raise awareness among public and industrial stakeholders about the potential of high-tech to transform outdated low-tech agriculture and livestock management practices, thus fostering a sustainable service industry rooted in bio-hybrid technology.
We have successfully developed the main actuator of the system. The queen visual tracking system has been developed, successfully tested, and is already providing valuable research data. We successfully integrated the tracking system with the main actuator and collected a large amount of data from queen trajectories over several months. We developed a prototype end-effector, which is a multi-agent system manipulating interactive agents in relation to the queen, and evaluated its motion control performance through numerical simulation. We also developed a system to test the biocompatibility of materials for biological acceptability in the hive. We developed a model that describes the behavior of the queen, her court, and the interactions between them and gained new insights into the biology of this species. The consortium made significant progress despite the obstacles posed by the pandemic. Various in-person and online workshops and meetings were conducted. Several conference and journal publications were produced to present the theoretical concept and the first results of the RoboRoyale project to the community and to the public. Building on insights from the first project period, the consortium has planned a clear path on how to proceed in future project periods.
Scientific and technological contributions to the foundation of a new future technology:
RoboRoyale provides an autonomous multi-robotic system that works in conjunction with highly complex social insects, honeybees. This system creates a bio-hybrid entity while also contributing to the surrounding environment (i.e. the ecosystem in which the bio-hybrid entity is placed) such as through pollination. This innovative approach represents a significant achievement and will inspire new methods and symbiotic applications.
-RoboRoyale will, for the first time, allow precise monitoring of queen behaviour over an extended period of time (weeks and months), recording millions of queen movement activities and the state of the colony at various times of the year. This will give the scientific community access to entirely new data sources based on long-term observations of queens that have not been available before. It will be invaluable for understanding queen behavior and biology, and for developing improved hive management strategies.
-The data collected from this “core” of the colony (the queen and her court) is of unprecedented high quality and resolution, allowing for the recording and automatic analysis of microscopic-scale interactions between conspecifics. This technology will enable new scientific insights into fundamental biological processes that would not be possible without it.
-Utilising the collected data to monitor the ecosystem status will be made possible through a list of potential indicators in the behavior of the observed animals, or through measurements on the animals, to determine a proxy for the health of the ecosystem in which the bio-hybrid system is located.
Potential for future social or economic impact or market creation:
-RoboRoyale has developed a new generation of observation hives that provide an innovative method for observing and interacting with the queen and court bees within their normal social context. The queen tracking system has the ability to continuously track the queen and court bees with high resolution and a high frame rate. This new observation system can also be adapted for research on other insects.
-The open-source multi-camera system for real-time localisation for RoboRoyale is capable of precisely estimating the positions of objects across large areas. This feature is crucial not only in robotics and biology research but also, e.g. in manufacturing or logistics.
-The concept of the multi-agent end-effector could inspire the next generation of multiarmed systems for single port surgery manipulators, which are specialized medical instruments for minimally invasive surgery. Such manipulators can perform independent tasks, such as coagulation, cutting, and suturing, while the centralized unit ensures safety parameters, such as preventing bleeding.
Building leading research and innovation capacity across Europe by the involvement of key actors:
-RoboRoyale brings together roboticists, ethologists, engineers, material scientists, complexity scientists, and ecologists. The consortium will focus on the novel way of system design by bringing together a highly interdisciplinary consortium to effectively build infrastructure (biohybrid entities and methods) that can be used by a wider community and also by actively reaching out through conferences, exhibitions, and other events.
-Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the project, a strong connection is being developed between technical and natural sciences. Ultimately, one of the main goals of the project is to create a biohybrid system, a unity of biological and technical actors.
The interdisciplinarity in these fields will further increase as new scientific and economic opportunities arise, tightening cooperation between technical and natural sciences.
-RoboRoyale supports early career scientists and provides students with the opportunity to complete their theses as part of the project and to work temporarily at other institutes across Europe. Also, the project actively works to integrate female scientists into male-dominated fields of research, such as engineering.
RoboRoyale provides an autonomous multi-robotic system that works in conjunction with highly complex social insects, honeybees. This system creates a bio-hybrid entity while also contributing to the surrounding environment (i.e. the ecosystem in which the bio-hybrid entity is placed) such as through pollination. This innovative approach represents a significant achievement and will inspire new methods and symbiotic applications.
-RoboRoyale will, for the first time, allow precise monitoring of queen behaviour over an extended period of time (weeks and months), recording millions of queen movement activities and the state of the colony at various times of the year. This will give the scientific community access to entirely new data sources based on long-term observations of queens that have not been available before. It will be invaluable for understanding queen behavior and biology, and for developing improved hive management strategies.
-The data collected from this “core” of the colony (the queen and her court) is of unprecedented high quality and resolution, allowing for the recording and automatic analysis of microscopic-scale interactions between conspecifics. This technology will enable new scientific insights into fundamental biological processes that would not be possible without it.
-Utilising the collected data to monitor the ecosystem status will be made possible through a list of potential indicators in the behavior of the observed animals, or through measurements on the animals, to determine a proxy for the health of the ecosystem in which the bio-hybrid system is located.
Potential for future social or economic impact or market creation:
-RoboRoyale has developed a new generation of observation hives that provide an innovative method for observing and interacting with the queen and court bees within their normal social context. The queen tracking system has the ability to continuously track the queen and court bees with high resolution and a high frame rate. This new observation system can also be adapted for research on other insects.
-The open-source multi-camera system for real-time localisation for RoboRoyale is capable of precisely estimating the positions of objects across large areas. This feature is crucial not only in robotics and biology research but also, e.g. in manufacturing or logistics.
-The concept of the multi-agent end-effector could inspire the next generation of multiarmed systems for single port surgery manipulators, which are specialized medical instruments for minimally invasive surgery. Such manipulators can perform independent tasks, such as coagulation, cutting, and suturing, while the centralized unit ensures safety parameters, such as preventing bleeding.
Building leading research and innovation capacity across Europe by the involvement of key actors:
-RoboRoyale brings together roboticists, ethologists, engineers, material scientists, complexity scientists, and ecologists. The consortium will focus on the novel way of system design by bringing together a highly interdisciplinary consortium to effectively build infrastructure (biohybrid entities and methods) that can be used by a wider community and also by actively reaching out through conferences, exhibitions, and other events.
-Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the project, a strong connection is being developed between technical and natural sciences. Ultimately, one of the main goals of the project is to create a biohybrid system, a unity of biological and technical actors.
The interdisciplinarity in these fields will further increase as new scientific and economic opportunities arise, tightening cooperation between technical and natural sciences.
-RoboRoyale supports early career scientists and provides students with the opportunity to complete their theses as part of the project and to work temporarily at other institutes across Europe. Also, the project actively works to integrate female scientists into male-dominated fields of research, such as engineering.