Roboroyale is funded by Horizon Europe and is led Dr Farshad Arvin from the Computer Science Department at Durham University, in collaboration with researchers from University of Graz, Czech Technical University and Middle East Technical University.
The tech, which is to be tested in coming months, will see six to eight robotic court bees, some sporting tiny cameras, steered inside an observation hive.
The goal to allow these robots to observe and interact with a living honeybee queen inside of a fully functional beehive. These robots will replace some of the queen’s court bees in order to monitor the status of the queen to and improve conditions when necessary.
Ultimately, the aim is to allow the robots to interact autonomously with a living queen inside a fully functioning beehive.
“Through a combination of machine learning, behavioural modelling and advanced control methods, our system will gradually learn how to groom the queen,” the project team says.
“Our special idea is that we can affect a whole ecosystem, potentially millions of plants and, in consequence, hundreds of millions of animals and other organisms, by simply affecting one single living organism in a natural and non-invasive way with robots.”