Bee grade vision could guide drones Wednesday, 11 May 2016

British engineers are hoping that a new model of the way bees navigate around their environment despite their small brains could unlock new ways of controlling the flight of autonomous aircraft and other robots.

The research, undertaken at the University of Sheffield, attempts to explain how bees use their vision to detect movement in the world around them and avoid crashing into objects.

“Honeybees are excellent navigators and explorers, using vision extensively in these tasks, despite having a brain of only one million neurons,” said lead researcher Alex Cope.

“Understanding how bees avoid walls, and what information they can use to navigate, moves us closer to the development of efficient algorithms for navigation and routing – which would greatly enhance the performance of autonomous flying robotics.”

Bees use a technique called optic flow, which monitors how objects appear to be moving in their field of vision, to control their flight, but precisely how they do this is a mystery. Study of bees’ brains has only identified structures that can determine the direction of an object’s motion as the bees see it, but not its speed.

The Sheffield team discovered that combining the feedback of several of these ‘motion-direction’ sensing brain structures could allow the bees to sense ‘motion speed’. They tested the theory by creating a virtual corridor whose walls were made up from a series of objects connected together. Sensing these objects as they pass through the virtual bee’s field of vision on both sides guided the insect along the corridor.

Using this approach in robotics could allow a navigation system to be built up from relatively simple, low-cost and low-power sensors.

The research is part of a project called Green Brain, which aims to construct a digital model of the brain of a honeybee and use it to fly a small drone using only the inputs the bee would have to navigate: sight and smell.

The next phase of the project will be to understand how bees use vision to determine which direction they are pointing in, and how they then use this information to solve the tasks they face in their lives.

 

Photo: FreeImages.com/Fernando Doutel