Projects

The EU-FET project HIVEOPOLIS aims at building the beehive of the future. Equipped with sensors and actuators, this beehive is half a smart house and half a bee hive. Built from organic and decomposable materials, e.g., from mushrooms hyphae grown on coffee waste and wooden filament, it combines mechatronics with sustainability. The electronic equipment observes the bees behaviors and growth, in order to ensure a healthy colony. Actuators feed free heating energy to the beehive, removing nutritional stress from the colony without feeding them with any additional substances. This keeps the honey natural, as more natural nectar remains for being harvested by the beekeeper without any energetic loss for the bees. Other actuators feed environmental information to the bees, e.g., through dancing robots that recruit them to specific healthy and safe food sources. In parallel, the natural dances performed by the bees are decoded for registering exactly where the nectar, which can be harvested by the beekeeper later in the form of honey, was originally collected. This "proof-of-origin" for the ultimately harvested honey is a unique aspect for quality control that is of high relevance for more and more heath-interested future customers. In addition, the hive's design and architecture play an important role in this project, not only to make the hive visually attractive for hobbyists and lifestyle beekeepers but also to produce a shape and a microclimate that resembles the natural housing of a bee colony, e.g., a cavity of a hollow tree. Additional features like the "fractional harvesting system" and the "bee traffic management system" allow the beekeepers to harvest small portions of honey (e.g. for the daily breakfast) without any opening of the hive. When beekeepers have to perform hive manipulations in the hive, such as harvesting honey , they can proactively have the bees to leave these parts of the hive, providing security to the beekeeping personnel and to the bees in times of these colony treatments: These empty modules have been made bee-free beforehand by the HIVEOPOLIS system by gently guiding all bees into other regions of the hive. This makes beekeeping more open to everybody, what ultimately is beneficial for bees and for the ecosystems around us. (read more)

This EU-FET LAUNCHPAD project ATEMPGRAD aims at developing an early prototype of a universal and inexpensive device that will allow schools and universities to teach STEM topics in various disciplines in an interdisciplinary and hands-on way. The device can be used to let students experience hands-on-science regarding different topics, but it is especially tailored towards questions like "How do environmental factors act on living organisms?". For example the factor temperature can be investigated in times of climate change. It allows easy experimentation with plants (e.g., cress), animals (e.g., bugs) or food (e.g., coconut fat). Topics may come from biology, nutrition sciences, physics, chemistry and mathematics. Students perform their own experiments with the device and then analyze their results and present them, e.g., in writing. Specific teaching materials support ATEMPGRAD courses. (read more)

The aim of the EU-FET project subCULTron is to create a large robot swarm that is capable of environmental monitoring. We chose the Lagoon of Venice as a benchmark place to conduct this project. The swarm created in this project is composed of 3 types of robots: aPads are like lily pads on the surface, aFish are fish-shaped robots actively browsing and exploring the body of water and aMussels sit like mussels or clams on the ocean floor and observe regions of interest on the long term. All three robot types work together to achieve one objective: stay operational as a swarm as long as possible in an environment which is not a safe laboratory or a swimming pool but a full-fledged natural lagoon with a vibrant living city in it: Venice. (read more)

The EU-FET project Flora Robotica aims at creating biohybrid systems that consist of robots and living plants, both influencing each other. The objective of this cooperative behavior is to grow living architecture from braided materials which offer a substrate for climbing plants. Some parts of the structure get stringer this way, as the plants add stability by adding material while other parts stay unsupported and might eventually even decay. This way, a structure grows, partially determined by the plants, partially determined by the robots, partially determined by the architecture that surrounds it, partially by the human stakeholders and partially by the local environment. To consider all these factors, machine learning is employed to autonomously find out which robot behaviors will generate the desired plant growth to achieve higher-level architectural objectives. (read more)

The aim of this FWF project is to create a BEECLUST-driven robot swarm that operates in dynamic temperature gradient fields (like the bees do). While the BEECLUST algorithm, which is derived from honeybees' collective thermotaxis, was implemented on my robot swarms, it was always searching in an environment that was characterized by other stimuli: light, terrain depth or magnetic field. Thus, a re-embodiment of the original source of inspiration, honeybees' thermotactic behavior, was long missing. (read more)

The main objective of the EU-FET project SYMBRION is to generate robotic "organisms" from modular robotic "cell" modules that can be physically docked to each other. As each module can bend with an internal hinge and has 4 docking directions possible in parallel, a high number of different body forms is possible. Any specific form of motion for a specific body shape requires coordinations of the bending of the individual units. This has to be spatially and chronologically coordinated, so the the whole organism starts to crawl, walk or maybe even jump. To avoid the need of human programmers to hand-code X motion programs for Y body shapes for each of the Z possible environmental conditions (e.g. terrain form, ground materials), we employ evolutionary computation methods in this project to let the robots find their effective motion gait programs on their own. Just like any living organism, in a juvenile phase, these robot organisms learn, in the beginning of their mission runtime, how to move their own body efficiently and effectively. (read more)

The main aim of the EU-FET project I-SWARM is to create the largest autonomous robot swarm of its days, with 1000 robots, each of them in a size of 2.5mm in each direction, with 3 vibrating legs and an electrostatic lever. As a development platform for its bio-inspired algorithms serves the robot Jasmine (2.5cm in each dimension), which was with 380 interacting robots the largest autonomous robot swarm from 2005-2011. (read more)