Robert Matthew Mills

A robotic honeycomb for interaction with a honeybee colony

Rafael Botner Barmak, Robert Matthew Mills, Francesco Mondada

Robotic technologies have shown the capability to interact with living organisms and even to form integrated mixed societies composed of living and artificial agents. Biocompatible robots, incorporating sensing and actuation capable of generating and responding to relevant stimuli, can be a tool to study collective behaviors previously unattainable with traditional techniques. To investigate collective behaviors of the western honeybee (Apis mellifera), we designed a robotic system capable of observing and modulating the bee cluster using an array of thermal sensors and actuators. We initially integrated the system into a beehive populated with about 4000 bees for several months. The robotic system was able to observe the colony by continuously collecting spatiotemporal thermal profiles of the winter cluster. Furthermore, we found that our robotic device reliably modulated the superorganism’s response to dynamic thermal stimulation, influencing its spatiotemporal reorganization. In addition, after identifying the thermal collapse of a colony, we used the robotic system in a “life-support” mode via its thermal actuators. Ultimately, we demonstrated a robotic device capable of autonomous closed-loop interaction with a cluster comprising thousands of individual bees. Such biohybrid societies open the door to investigation of collective behaviors that necessitate observing and interacting with the animals within a complete social context, as well as for potential applications in augmenting the survivability of these pollinators crucial to our ecosystems and our food supply.

2023

Bio-Hybrid Systems for Ecosystem Level Effects

Rafael Botner Barmak, Matthieu Jean-Michel Philippe Broisin, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Robert Matthew Mills, Francesco Mondada, Martina Szopek

In a time marked by ecological decay and by the perspective of a severe backlash of this ecosystem decay and climate devastation onto human society, bold moves that employ novel technology to counteract this decline are required. We present a novel concept of employing Artificial Life technology, in the form of cybernetically enhanced bio-hybrid superorganisms as a countermeasure and as a contingency plan. We describe our general conceptual paradigm, consisting of three interacting action plans, namely: (1) Organismic Augmentation; (2) Bio- Hybrid Socialization and (3) Ecosystem Hacking, which together compose a method to create a novel agent for ecosystem stabilization. We demonstrate, through early results from the research project HIVEOPOLIS, a specific way how classic Artificial Life technologies can create such a living, ecologically active and technologically-augmented superorganism that operates outside in the field. These technologies range from cellular automata and biomimetic robots to novel and sustainable biocompatible materials. Aiming at having a real-world impact on the society that relies on our biosphere is an important aspect in Artificial Life research and is fundamental to our methodology to create a physically embodied and useful form of Artificial Life.

MIT Press2021

Robots mediating interactions between animals for interspecies collective behaviors

Frank Bonnet, Robert Matthew Mills, Francesco Mondada, Martina Szopek

Self-organized collective behavior has been analyzed in diverse types of gregarious animals. Such collective intelligence emerges from the synergy between individuals, which behave at their own time and spatial scales and without global rules. Recently, robots have been developed to collaborate with animal groups in the pursuit of better understanding their decision-making processes. These biohybrid systems make cooperative relationships between artificial systems and animals possible, which can yield new capabilities in the resulting mixed group. However, robots are currently tailor-made to successfully engage with one animal species at a time. This limits the possibilities of introducing distinct species-dependent perceptual capabilities and types of behaviors in the same system. Here, we show that robots socially integrated into animal groups of honeybees and zebrafish, each one located in a different city, allowing these two species to interact. This interspecific information transfer is demonstrated by collective decisions that emerge between the two autonomous robotic systems and the two animal groups. The robots enable this biohybrid system to function at any distance and operates in water and air with multiple sensorimotor properties across species barriers and ecosystems. These results demonstrate the feasibility of generating and controlling behavioral patterns in biohybrid groups of multiple species. Such interspecies connections between diverse robotic systems and animal species may open the door for new forms of artificial collective intelligence, where the unrivaled perceptual capabilities of the animals and their brains can be used to enhance autonomous decision-making, which could find applications in selective "rewiring" of ecosystems.

2019

Climate change, vegetation dynamics and carbon cycling in peatlands: the role of vascular plants in CO2 sequestration

Luca Bragazza, Konstantin Svetlozarov Gavazov, Robert Matthew Mills, Bjorn Jozef Maria Robroek

The project VeganPeat is described in this poster. IN particular, the workpackage oncerning the quantification of 14C in soil respired CO2 to detect the role of vascular plant abundance in promoting the decomposition of old organic matter in two peatlands located at different altitude.

2014

Social Adaptation of Robots for Modulating Self-Organization in Animal Societies

Frank Bonnet, Marcelo Elias de Oliveira, Robert Matthew Mills, Francesco Mondada

The goal of the work presented here is to influence the overall behaviour of specific animal societies by integrating computational mechatronic devices (robots) into those societies. To do so, these devices should be accepted by the animals as part of the society and/or as part of the collectively formed environment. For that, we have developed two sets of robotic hardware for integrating into societies of two different animals: zebrafish and young honeybees. We also developed mechanisms to provide feedback from the behaviours of societies for the controllers of the robotic system. Two different computational methods are then used as the controllers of the robots in simulation and successfully adapted by evolutionary algorithms to influence the simulated animals for desired behaviours. Together, these advances in mechatronic hardware, feedback mechanisms, and controller methodology are laying essential foundations to facilitate experiments on modulating self-organised behaviour in mixed animal–robot societies.

IEEE2014