Meeting Abstract
Honeybees actively ventilate their nests by flapping their wings at the entrance of the hive in response to high air temperatures. Individual bees respond only to local temperatures but collectively they are able to coordinate large-scale, efficient flows by separating inflow and outflow in space. This spatial separation arises not due to direct communication or coordination between bees, but due to the interaction between distributed fanning behavior, airflow and temperature. We designed a system of honeybee-inspired robots composed of temperature sensors, DC fans, and analog control circuitry. We distributed these robots at the entrance of a heated chamber and quantified the behavior of the robots, the flow they collectively generate and the temperature profile along the entrance of the chamber during ventilation bouts. This artificial system allows us to experimentally probe questions related to the physical mechanisms of self-organization in this system, which are difficult to observe in the honeybee system.
