RoboBee: A biomimetic robot to study the waggle dance of the honey bee

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are capable to communicate the distance and direction to their hive mates by a ritualized and unique movement, called the waggle dance. This behaviour has been thoroughly investigated since its discovery by Karl von Frisch. However, the mechanisms and the informational content of the waggle dance are still not fully analyzed.

We are in the process of building a biomimetic robot in cooperation with the institute of computer sciences of the Freie Universität Berlin (Professor Rojas) which will imitate the waggle dance of the honey bee. We aim to analyze the necessary and sufficient signals allowing the follower bees to trace the indicated food source.

We aim to program the robotic bee resembling the movements of a normal dancing bee imitating several signalling components of a natural bee. These signals will by systematically manipulated and the effect of the communication process will be analyzed by applying our harmonic radar technique for following bees on their flights

Our Project Website: RoboBee

This work is funded by the “Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft” Me 365/37-1.