By: Nick Gambino
Farmers are more and more relying on technology to monitor their vast fields and crops. By getting a bird’s eye view through use of drones, they’re able to keep track of every bit of their land without expending wasted time and effort.
But apparently the use of drones wasn’t enough for the researchers over at the University of Washington. They’ve figured out how to create tiny sensor backpacks, weighing only .0035 ounces, that can be strapped onto a bumblebee, thus creating a monitoring system that runs for several more hours and has longer battery life. They’re calling the system Living IoT.
The miniscule backpacks would allow farmers and others that work in agricultural or environmental fields to gather data for hours at a time, as opposed to the 20 or 30 minutes drones can stay in the air. Eventually the bee needs to take a break and when it does, it simply goes back to its hive for a recharge of its pack and its energy. Instead of using GPS, the system uses antennas set up around the property that triangulate the position of the pack, so you know where they are at all times. Once they return to the hive you can upload whatever data was gathered.
“We showed for the first time that it’s possible to actually do all this computation and sensing using insects in lieu of drones,” Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor and senior author of the paper detailing the sending system said.
The problem is, the current packs only store about 30Kb of data, making it a limited tech for now. With that kind of storage, they can only collect info like temperature and humidity, which is helpful for sure, but again, limited. The scientists behind this nifty little tech are looking to develop it further to include live data gathering and the ability to start collecting data only when that bee is in a specific area. This makes it more targeted as the little insect can’t be controlled like a drone.
Of course this is still in the early stages, but it looks like it could be a viable alternative to the limitations of drones.
