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This is a nice news, at least that’s how I see it, because it points out that the world we live in is amazingly complex in its simplicity. You see meadows and buzzing bees and that’s it. No reason to give a second thoughts about that.
Yet, that is a complex ecosystem and you cannot pick up just one component without considering the others, many are living a symbiotic relationship that took eons to happen and resulted in a mutual adaptation.
If something happens to one of the ecosystem component the whole may suffer to the point of extinction.
This is what makes farmers nervous in several places. Changes in the environment, partly caused by us, are affecting the ecosystem.
Many plants rely on bees for pollination and the health of bee-colonies is an indicator that is monitored by EPA, the US Environmental Protection Agency. The latest data show a bettering of the condition (it went from 28.7% colonies not surviving the winter in 2005/2006 to 31.1% not surviving in 2013 but now is 23.1%, still a bit too high but surely better and most important showing a change for the better).
The bee-crises has pointed some researchers to find alternative to bees and this has proved a quite difficult task. It is not just about finding a solution to make up for the decreasing number of bees, it is also about managing pollination in greenhouses, like in vertical farms.
Researchers at West Virginia University have received a grant to study the possibility of replacing bees by automating pollination using robots. The grant mentions that 24 billions worth of crops in US depends on various “natural pollinators” (read insects).
The researchers have created BrambleBee, a robot that can be an artificial pollinator (watch the clip).
It seems to me quite goofy in its movement and bulky, quite different from a bee! So far it has operated in the lab and it is using QR tag as beacons in its pollination duties, even though most plants are not that technology-advanced to sprout QR codes on their leaves 😉
What actually impressed me most was to see how bulky, and goofy, BrambleBee is. It is packaging advanced technology, like laser, GPS, image recognition, artificial intelligence, sophisticated mechanics (it has to mimic a bee and it uses very tiny soft brushes to pick up from anthers on the stamen and pollinate flowers). The image recognition is particularly tricky having to operate in a complex and ever changing environment where flowers (as the move in the wind) have to be identified in a 3D space.
So, if you think about it, and you start to see the problems being faced by BrambleBee, you start to appreciate both the magic of technology and even more the magic of bees (and Nature in general).
Virginia University is not the only one looking at creating robots for pollination. Walmart filed for a patent to create autonomous robotic bees for pollination. It is just a patent, not the real thing, but it is nevertheless interesting. It shows that technology is getting closer to emulate Nature in something that we could have considered as very simple and that it is turning out to be extremely complex. Interestingly, researchers are approaching these tasks through artificial intelligence supporting autonomous systems, often using swarm intelligence to simplify the single component.
It is another example on the path towards the emergence of symbiotic autonomous systems being addressed by the IEEE FDC SAS Initiative.
