Abstract In digital agriculture, large-scale data acquisition and analysis can improve farm management by allowing growers to constantly monitor the state of a field. Deploying large autonomous robot teams to navigate and monitor cluttered environments, however, is difficult and costly. Here, we present methods that would allow us to leverage managed colonies of honey bees equipped with miniature flight recorders to monitor orchard pollination activity. Tracking honey bee flights can inform estimates of crop pollination, allowing growers to improve yield and resource allocation. Honey bees are adept at maneuvering complex environments and collectively pool information about nectar and pollen sources through thousands of daily flights. Additionally, colonies are present in orchards before and during bloom for many crops, as growers often rent hives to ensure successful pollination. We characterize existing Angle-Sensitive Pixels (ASPs) for use in flight recorders and calculate memory and resolution trade-offs. We further integrate ASP data into a colony foraging simulator and show how large numbers of flights refine system accuracy, using methods from robotic mapping literature. Our results indicate promising potential for such agricultural monitoring, where we leverage the superiority of social insects to sense the physical world, while providing data acquisition on par with explicitly engineered systems.
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A Practical Model for Realistic Butterfly Flight Simulation
Butterflies are not only ubiquitous around the world but are also widely known for inspiring thrill resonance, with their elegant and peculiar flights. However, realistically modeling and simulating butterfly flights—in particular, for real-time graphics and animation applications—remains an under-explored problem. In this article, we propose an efficient and practical model to simulate butterfly flights. We first model a butterfly with parametric maneuvering functions, including wing-abdomen interaction. Then, we simulate dynamic maneuvering control of the butterfly through our force-based model, which includes both the aerodynamics force and the vortex force. Through many simulation experiments and comparisons, we demonstrate that our method can efficiently simulate realistic butterfly flight motions in various real-world settings.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2005430
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10359111
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Graphics
- Volume:
- 41
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0730-0301
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 12
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3510459
