Introduction
I wish you well in the beekeeping of the future :)
No electronic bee or hive connected, no there is no question of replacing what makes the charm and quality of beekeeping!
Here we are talking about assistance, help on repetitive and laborious tasks that each beekeeper implements throughout the year and more particularly from May to October.
I present the idea of "apiary robotics assistant" !
A multifunctional robot that will help you on a daily basis, and especially on visits to hives:
- Opening the hives by reducing the disturbance of the bees and gaining rapidity of execution
- Verification of each frame, both body and increases
- Photographic recording of each face of each frame
- Analysis of the contents of each frame (brood, honey, parasite, etc.) using expert systems (AI: Artificial Intelligence)
- Moving and changing the frames on each increase if required or programmed in advance
- And full of other features in mind ...!
This robot is scalable, adaptable and I estimate that it will save you more than 80% of your time.
Imagine an assistant who independently checks each frame of each hive and receives all the information in the form of photos thus constituting a database of all your apiary that will allow you to quietly decide the actions to make him do, and all that without anything Change in your beehive, hives, or bees!
This robot is able to visit a hive comprising two hikes in less than 10 mn, do the calculation for all your livestock!
But all this is only a projection.
This project has just begun and a long way presents itself to me. Conception, prototyping, financing, etc ... but above all I chose to communicate, to detail each step because I believe in a project focused on the user experience: how can this robot help you daily in your apiary to Allow you to improve the life of your bees and therefore yours!
Concretely, I plan on 2 years of development to be able to propose a robot at a public price between 10 000 and 15 000 euros.
I want to use as many open-source and universal solutions as software and hardware.
The objective is a scalable robot capable of operating on several types of terrain, on different types of hives (dadant, langroth, warré), to operate in "fleet" and to constitute a database containing all the snapshots of all The history of all actions and with the help of expert systems from the AI, able to make decisions independently, such as moving executives or changing them by dragging into a store of loaded new executives Directly on the robot.
Finally, this robot will become indispensable at the time of the harvest with its capacity to replace more than 5 natural persons thanks to its harvesting boxes which will put your frameworks in shelter the time to return to the meillerie.
All this sounds enticing but maybe a little too good to be true.
Yet I have arguments: industrial designer training I am currently computer consultant for large accounts. I am interested in amateur electronics (arduino, raspberry) but also to beekeeping for 3 years (I have several hives that provide me more than ten kilos of honey each year).
I am not an experienced robotic or commercial expert but I am used to investing in every project, bringing a multi-cultural versatility that allows me to have a global vision of the project.
After this long introduction, I will present in a few days my first work on the subject.
Thank you for reading me.
