|
Cover Story |
|
|
Bees, Ants, Monkeys & Robots
Tucker Balch studies animal | |
HUNDREDS OF RESEARCH SUBJECTS are unconcerned with the arrival of Assistant Professor of Computing Tucker Balch
|
Balch is developing algorithms to analyze the social behavior of bees and ants. He works closely with Assistant Professor Frank Dellaert and researcher Zia Khan who have created new approaches in computer vision to track these animals. With Professor Kim Wallen at Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center, he is also observing monkeys. Balch hopes these studies will yield behavior models that can be implemented in computer code.
"I believe the language of behavior is common between robots and animals," Balch explains. "Potentially, that means in the long term we could videotape ants for a long period, learn their 'program' and run it on a robot. But that's at least five years away."
|
Meanwhile, Balch is gathering data on bees' and ants' behavior with a computer vision system his team developed. They hope it will revolutionize the way biologists observe animals for behavioral research. Now, with help from insect researchers Tom Seeley at Cornell University and Deborah Gordon at Stanford University, the research team's software can simultaneously recognize what bee is doing which job. As he learns more about the various activities of bees, Balch can build a model of these behaviors. Then he could test hypotheses by simulating bee behavior.
At Yerkes, Balch and Khan are working with Wallen to learn about the spatial memory of and social interaction among monkeys. Already, they can track the movements of individual monkeys as they search for and find hidden treats in a large enclosure. Later, they want to observe a troop of 60 to 80 monkeys living together in a larger compound.
Dog robots in the BORG lab are being studied for use as search robots for disaster sites.
(300-dpi JPEG version -906k)
So far, researchers have learned that male and female monkeys have different spatial memories.
Males apparently remember the physical distance to food, while females follow landmarks to find treats, Balch says.
"We're involved to measure precisely where the monkeys go and how long it takes them to find the food," Balch explains. "We use the information from experiments to test hypotheses on spatial memory. We're more interested in the social systems among these animals. But we need this basic capability to track monkeys in 3D. So this work is a first step in this direction."
Balch's projects fall under the umbrella of the "Borg Lab" – named after the Borg of "Star Trek" fame – he and his College of Computing colleagues Frank Dellaert, Thad Starner and Sven Koenig founded in 2002. They want to enable people and robots to work together effectively in dynamic, noisy and unknown environments.
The researchers are especially interested in making the most effective use of sensors distributed among robot teams. For example, Dellaert blends computer vision data from robot teams to depict in 3D the environment the team is navigating. This technology could allow military or law enforcement officials to send a team of robots into an unknown or dangerous area while officials experience the environment virtually in
photo by Nicole Cappello
For more information, contact Tucker Balch at 404-385-2861
or tucker@cc.gatech.edu.
Contents
Research Horizons
GT Research News
GTRI
Georgia Tech
Send questions and comments regarding these pages to
webadmin@edi.gatech.edu
Last updated: Dec.11, 2003
