Group Members

Bern Klein Holkenborg 0892107

Marrit Jen Hong Li 0963568

Jorik Mols 0851883

Week 1

The progress of the first week is shown below. The start of the project is described and explained in catagories.

Assignments and results

Subject

Bees are little creatures, yet essential to flora and fauna around the globe. Bees are some of the hardest working creatures on the planet, and because of their laborious work ethic, we owe many thanks to this amazing yet often under appreciated insect.

Our lives – and the world as a whole – would be a much different place if bees didn’t exist. To illustrate this fact, consider these numbers: bees are responsible for pollinating about one-sixth of the flowering plant species worldwide and approximately 400 different agricultural types of plant. Thus bees support a large billion euro economy of farmer industry, but more importantly, bees support a wide variety of food for both animals and humans.

However, in recent years, bee population has dramatically dwindled down, mainly because of freezing to death in harsh winters caused by global warming. To indicate the problem: In the last decade, 30% of the bee population in the United States dissappeared already.

In this project, this problem is analysed and a robotic solution like a smart beehive will be investigated.

Objectives

In order to keep bees alive in winter, a system is needed that monitors and acts on the bee colony and it's environment. The main and obvious objective thus is keeping bee colonies alive. However furter objectives have to be set as to specify our goals for this system.

Bees are fragile creatures, this system has to protect them versus an everchanging harsh environment. Information is essential for any smart system so it can act upon the data. The monotoring of a bee colony should be accurate, have a wide range of parameters such as temperature, humidity, bee activity, bee deaths, bee population and honey storage, and most importantly, the monotoring of the bee colony should not interfere with the colonies well-being. Creating such a monotoring system will prove to be challenging but essential, thus making this our first objective.

Secondly, the smart beehive must be able to act upon the information fed to the system via it's sensors. It not only should inform beekeepers on essential data, but should interact with the system itself as well. It should be able to change temperature and humidity. It should be able to control light level and intensity. It should be able to control it's doors. It should maybe even control where the colonies queen is located, or where/how/when how much honey is stored. These actuators have to be designed as to comfort the colony without any possible chance of inflicting damage to the colony and or beekeeper.

As said above, the system should be interactable by human as well. Information must be fed to the beekeeper for optimal beekeeping. This information stream must be desigend and an user-friendly interaction system should be included in the smart beehive.

Optimally, the smart beehive should be modular, as to easily increase or decrease the capacity of the hive as needed by the beekeeper. A compleet smart beehive is to be designed/prototyped and subjected to a series of test by expert and amateur beekeepers. Usability, effectivity, productivity and overall benefit are to be assesed.

Users

Approach

Project planning

Week 2:

- Give presentation

- Research into the subject, state-of-the-art and USE aspects

- Define a concrete problem

- Brainstorm on potential prototypes

- Contact users we could interview

- Finalize planning and work division