Animals and technology: When bees and drones join forces to search for mines in BiH and Croatia
A team from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia has figured out how to use drones to monitor bees while they are hard at work
Among the virtues of bees that you may not have known about is their ability to detect bombs.
Thanks to the fact that they can smell explosives with their antennae, researchers in countries like Croatia have spent years perfecting the use of bees to locate mines.
But there is one problem.
While insects happily buzz around mine-contaminated areas, it's extremely difficult for humans to keep track of where they're going, partly because chasing bees across a minefield isn't the best idea.
This is where drones come into play.
A team from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia has figured out how to use drones to monitor bees while they are hard at work.
Unmanned aerial vehicles take pictures of the insects, and the pictures are later analyzed by computer to determine where mines are hidden in the ground.
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Landmines buried during wars decades ago still pose a deadly threat in many parts of the world.
Thousands of landmines were laid during the war in the Balkans in the 1990s, and many remain there to this day.
It is estimated that there are 80.000 mines in Bosnia and Herzegovina i around 30.000 more in Croatia.
Mine clearance is a long-term, painstaking project that offers no easy solutions. But technological innovation can still help a lot.
"We wanted to try to protect people from potential danger... and to try to use drones," says Vladimir Risojević from the University of Banja Luka.
Before that, another team of fellow researchers perfected it method for training bees to detect mines.
They achieved this by teaching bees to associate the smell of TNT with food - a sugar solution.
In the field, trained bees have a habit of congregating in clusters near where mines are buried in the hope of finding food there.
Such actions have been carried out for many years, but Professor Risojević says that he and his team realized that computers could help - by automatically analyzing recordings of bees that are looking for mines, so that they could then draw a map of their activities and locate mines more easily. .
Even that proved awkward.
"It's very difficult even for humans to find these bees in flight on video, let alone with computer vision systems," he says.
"There were moments when we thought we were completely crazy for even trying, but I was pleasantly surprised by the results we achieved."
The team began filming areas under clear skies on which they pasted "synthetic bees" - blurry gray blobs that buzz around the scene.
Once they were able to make the synthetic bees indistinguishable from real bee footage, the team used a machine learning algorithm and trained the computer to accurately detect and follow the blobs on the screen.
In the test described in a recently published study, the algorithm proved more than 80 percent accurate in finding these digital bees.
The researchers then went out to the minefield, which is safe because it contains real but deactivated mines buried in anonymous locations at the Croatian Mine Action Center - to verify how the system works in authentic conditions.
Details of the test results have yet to be published in an academic study, but Professor Risojevic says there was a strong correlation between where the bees congregated and known mine sites at the test site.
At the moment, the system works by using drones programmed to fly a predetermined path, flying over a minefield while filming bees buzzing around.
Subsequent analysis of the footage shows exactly where the bees congregated.
It may take several years before this approach is used in places crowded with dangerous, active mines, says Professor Risojević.
However, he thinks the approach can complement other demining techniques.
Among the technological tools already used for demining are handheld metal detectors with built-in ground search radar.
Even with the help of such technology, it is difficult for demining teams to know for sure whether they have removed every mine from a mined area.
Bees and drones could, for example, perform checks after everything, and confirm that none were missed.
"Good technological innovations that can help delineate and confirm dangerous areas are really very useful," says Matthew Bray Bolton of Pace University in New York, author of the book Political Minefields: Fighting Automated Killing.
However, he adds that there are no quick solutions to the problem of minefields.
Political entanglements and a lack of resources often mean that clean-up projects can drag on, regardless of the technologies available to help.
Plus, in countries like Yemen, mines they continue to set up to this day.
Professor Risojević hopes that, despite the obstacles, his team's system will one day help demining minefields in countries such as Croatia or Bosnia and Herzegovina.
And there could be another type of application.
In recent years, computer vision research has developed experimental systems that can find and track insects in the wild.
Professor Risojevic and his team suggest that such tools could one day monitor pollinators.
These insects, including bees, are crucial to the health of crops and ecosystems, but their numbers have been declining in recent years, largely due to pollution caused by human activities.
Insects and machines working together - a fun idea and potentially good for the planet.
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