Smart bees, the farmers of the future

Smart bees, the farmers of the future

Through a tiny data collection system they can monitor the state of the field

   The world of agriculture is modernized, the introduction of technology is speeding up the work of men and women in the field. The arrival of drones has modified the way people work and control changes.

However, researchers at the University of Washington have created a system to leave the big drones, by small natural planes . The chosen ones are the bees and these would be in charge of collecting all the information about the field .

   Through a small rechargeable device, the team of Shyam Gollakota, associate professor of the Faculty of Computing and Engineering, has created a tiny battery with seven hours of flight autonomy.

"Drones can fly for 10 or 20 minutes before they have to charge again, while our bees can collect data for hours," said Gollakota, associate professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. .

Researchers have designed this device that could replace drones so they fly over huge fields and monitor the temperature, humidity or health of crops . Drones need so much power to fly that they can not get very far without needing a charge.

The researchers designed a sensor backpack that mounts on the back of bees and weighs 102 milligrams

However, the size and consumption impair the functioning of the Gollakota project. Bees can not support much weight and GPS systems consume a lot of battery. In other projects, the researchers equipped the insects with small trackers that work with radio frequency identification. But, they did not include sensors to investigate the environment and its environment.

"We showed for the first time that it is possible to do all this calculation and detection using insects instead of drones," says Gollakota. For this study, the researchers designed a sensor backpack that mounts on the back of bees and weighs 102 milligrams , approximately the weight of seven grains of raw rice.

"The rechargeable battery that feeds the backpack weighs about 70 milligrams, so we had just over 30 milligrams for everything else, such as sensors and tracking system to track the position of the insect," says co-author Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, PhD student at the Allen School.

"It would be interesting to see if the bees prefer a region of the farm and visit other areas less frequently," adds eSawyer Fuller, assistant professor in the mechanical engineering department.