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The Bee Project

Advisors:

Prof. Richard Martin & Dr. Richard Howard

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Justin Yu

2024 CS & Math @ Rutgers

Meet The Team

Joel Paley

2024 ECE

@ Rutgers

Jack Bessen

2022 ECE

@ Rutgers

Arnesh Kumar Issar

2023 Chemical

@ IIT Kharagpur

Nikhil Sampath

2022

@ MHS

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Motivation

  • Nowadays there is a lot of radio frequency (RF) pollution due to electronics
  • Determine possible biological impacts of RF on bees
  • Specifically bees, as they account for about a third of our crops on Earth

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Our Experimental Setup

  • Indoor observation bee hive
  • Electromagnetic coil as stimulus

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Objective:

Use computers and cameras to determine if honeybees can detect magnetic field and how they react to it

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Heatmaps + a bit of orientation

  • Figure out if bees move depending on magnetic field
  • Attempt to find orientation of bees
  • Improve results for the future

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Background Subtraction and Ellipses for Bee Orientations

  • Implemented background subtraction algorithm in openCV in python to analyze the movement of the bees in the videos we took
  • Used the fitEllipse function to draw the proper ellipses around the moving bees that the algorithm picked up
  • Plotted the angle measurements of the negative field vs. no field, and positive field vs. no field

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Future improvements:

  • No false positives or false negatives
  • Draw ellipses around the static bees

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Bee Orientation Comparisons

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Pygame Simulation

  • The purpose of the simulation was to create a controlled environment to test the team’s algorithms
  • The real life video of the beehive had issues with lighting and resolution, so a controlled environment avoided these problems
  • The controlled environment was developed using Pygame, a Python library to easily generate computer graphics

VS.

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Pygame Simulation

  • Progress
    • Created simulation using arbitrarily “buzzing” yellow rectangles
    • Loaded a bee image into Pygame and got it to buzz
    • Used background estimation to get a background from the hive videos
  • Challenges
    • Combining two separate programs together
    • Rotating the bees to match their direction of movement
  • Goals
    • Expand the program to include multiple bees with the bee image
    • Incorporate tasks that bees perform

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Actual beehive video vs. simulation

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Thank you!

Any questions?