Future CNC: A-Bee-Bee (Spring 2012)

Site: Urban Rooftops

Collaborators: Yeliz Karadayi

The goal of this project was to envision the future of CNC and robotic technology. My teammate and I were interested in bees at the time because we had been reading about colony collapse disorder so we decided to come up with a way to use a 6-axis ABB robot as a tool to help bees in need. Through our research and interviews (see below), we narrowed our proposal down to an automated framework that would act as a beekeeper's assistant and strategically feed bees nectar at urban rooftop way stations. Using a simple GUI, designed in Processing to simulate an array of beehives, and an Arduino, we could trigger the robot to feed a beehive mockup in our lab. In the future, we see the potential of this system to be deployed at various rooftop locations in major cities and be controlled via a mobile app. The future of beekeeping may in fact be in the hands of an "A-Bee-Bee" robot. Check out our video featuring an interview with an urban beekeeper in Pittsburgh, as well as a live demo of the process!