Research library

Bio-Hybrid Systems for Ecosystem Level Effects

In a time marked by ecological decay and by the perspective of a severe backlash of this ecosystem decay and climate devastation onto human society, bold moves that employ novel technology to counteract this decline are required. We present a novel concept of employing Artificial Life technology, in the form of cybernetically enhanced bio-hybrid superorganisms as a countermeasure and as a contingency plan. We describe our general conceptual paradigm, consisting of three interacting action plans, namely: (1) Organismic Augmentation; (2) BioHybrid Socialization and (3) Ecosystem Hacking, which together compose a method to create a novel agent for ecosystem stabilization. We demonstrate, through early results from the research project HIVEOPOLIS, a specific way how classic Artificial Life technologies can create such a living, ecologically active and technologically-augmented superorganism that operates outside in the field. These technologies range from cellular automata and biomimetic robots to novel and sustainable biocompatible.

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Publication details

Organizations
🇦🇹 University of Graz🇩🇪 Humboldt University of Berlin🇨🇭 École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne🇩🇪 Freie Universität Berlin🇱🇻 Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies
Year
2022
Type
Conference

Relevancy to Gratheon

This paper is relevant to Gratheon because it informs entrance and behavior analytics in the Gratheon web app, the long-term autonomous-apiary and robotic intervention roadmap. Its methods and findings can be translated into product requirements for reliable field deployments: what should be sensed, how signals should be interpreted, and which uncertainty or validation limits need to be surfaced to beekeepers. For Gratheon, the work is most useful as an evidence-backed design reference for connecting local hive observations with actionable recommendations in the web app while keeping hardware practical for remote apiaries.