Toward Perpetual Occlusion-Aware Observation of Comb States in Living Honeybee Colonies

Honeybees are one of the most important pollinators in the ecosystem. Unfortunately, the dynamics of living honeybee colonies are not well understood due to their complexity and difficulty of observation. In our project “RoboRoyale”, we build and operate a robot to be a part of a bio-hybrid system, which currently observes the honeybee queen in the colony and physically tracks it with a camera. Apart from tracking and observing the queen, the system needs to monitor the state of the honeybee comb which is most of the time occluded by workerbees. This introduces a necessary tradeoff between tracking the queen and visiting the rest of the hive to create a daily map. We aim to collect the necessary data more effectively. We evaluate several mapping methods that consider the previous observations and forecasted densities of bees occluding the view. To predict the presence of bees, we use previously established maps of dynamics developed for autonomy in human-populated environments. Using data from the last observational season, we show significant improvement of the informed comb mapping methods over our current system. This will allow us to use our resources more effectively in the upcoming season.