Living IoT: Bionic Bee Backpacks for Data Collection

In the past few years, we have covered how robot bees can be used in the future for pollination. The Living IoT takes a different approach. It is a bionic bumblebee backpack that collects data for a period of up to 7 hours. Unlike tiny drones, those bees don’t need to be recharged while monitoring the environment.

University of Washington researchers built a localization system that tracks the bee’s position in 2D space as it captures temperature, humidity, and light intensity. These bionic backpacks weigh just over 100 milligrams. Data is uploaded at the end of the day using “backscatter.”

[HT]