Bees have been doing much for the whole human race from the beginning of time and are not appreciated enough. The newest thing they are doing to save the planet is that they are using their antennae’s to detect explosives mainly landmines hidden in war affected areas. Researchers in countries such as Croatia have spent the better part of the last few decades perfecting as to how this can be used to help war torn areas regain livable environments.
There is a catch to this situation. The insect will happily fly in the mine contaminated area but it isn’t easy for a human to keep track of the movement of this insect. This where the researchers bring drones into play. A team from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia have come up with a method of using drones to monitor the bees while they do the work of finding the land mines. The plan is to have the drone fly around and get the footage of the insects, then it will be analyzed by computers to reveal where the landmines may be hidden.
Vladimir Risojevic from the University of Banja Luka states “We wanted to try to exclude humans from potential danger… and try to use drones.” There was another team that had managed to train the bees to identify TNT by associating with food – sugar solution. By using this method they managed to get the bees to cluster where the landmines were buried. Whilst this method had been a good one Prof. Vladimir has made it clear that his team feels computers are more accurate and doesn’t take a lot of time. The Professor went on to say that “It’s very difficult for human observers to find these flying bees in this video footage let alone computer vision systems, There were moments when I thought that we are outright crazy for trying to do that but I am pleasantly surprised with the results that we obtained.”
The team initially started with drone captured footage of an outdoor area and ton this they added synthetic bees. This was done so that they could manage to capture the speed of normal bees and would not miss any footage. This test and algorithm proved to be more than 80% accurate. It was after they had these numbers they took the test out to the actual minefields and started to see how the system would perform.
As of right now the system is being tested in real minefields and capturing the footage of bees when they zigzag across controlled areas. Prof. Vladimir says that it would be a few years before this technology can be used in an actual war situation and that it could complement other demining techniques once further perfected.
