Open Theses

In short: We are building a robotic bee that is supposed to imitate the honeybee dance communication system. We therefor aim to reproduce all signals already found in that communication system. Furthermore we believe that information of the surroundings of the robotic bee has to be fed back to the motion control to avoid collisions (i.e. we build a visual feedback system using highspeed embedded vision). Every summer we seek for students helping with our field work, too. Our field site is in Klein Lüben (NW of Berlin) where we rent a farm for 3 months in summer.

1. "BeeRobot2.0"
   Since our current design of the robotic bee "floats" above the comb surface we are not able to reproduce the (potentially important) vibrations in the waggle portion of the dance. Also, we have to open a window in order to be able to insert the robot. This may lead to unwanted disturbances that affect the follower bees' behaviour. We seek for students that try different alternative designs for the next generation bee robot.
   
   keywords: hardware, mechanics
2. "BeeActivity"
   We have tracked the motion of many hundreds of bees throughout five months in summer 2010. We now want to analyze these data. This is a prototypical work for bioinformaticians, data visualization and matlab skills wanted!
   
   keywords: data analysis, data visualization, matlab

last modified: jan 2011