lessons from bees

provide answers for safe landing of aircrafts. An engineer would measure the distance, air speed and use other complicated calculations requiring heavy equipment. Insects use cues based on image motion to gauge the distances to objects”.

Prof. Srini is all praise for this little insect, whose general fascination is its ability to produce honey. “Bees are one of the smartest invertebrates. They have to memorise several things like food sources, the colour, shape and smell of a flower which has nectar. They also have great colour vision,” he said.

It will surprise you to know that a bee brain is the size of a sesame seed and weighs about a tenth of a milligram – while the human brain is about 1.5kg.

When Prof. Srini started observing bee behaviour, he was quickly impressed. “I realised that these creatures are actually miniature human beings - they’re extremely intelligent, they will learn things very quickly, they have excellent colour vision... They can remember things for long periods of time. They’re just beautiful creatures,” he said enthusiastically. He is working on learning more about a bee’s emotional range. “They’re remarkably patient when they’re foraging - they don’t sting you if you suddenly take away the food (but) if you went and intruded in the hive, they’d obviously show aggression... The way a bee follows a moving target when it’s angry is very different from the way a bee follows a flower, gently swaying in the breeze, when it’s trying to land on it... These are two totally different individuals,” he added. However, it is the simple joy of scientific discovery that drives him. “I took up this study for the better understanding of the bee brain, not knowing it would find any application,” he says.

cost, disposable robot planes for exploring Mars.

“We built microfliers - small aircrafts with a wingspan of a foot - which would take off from a mothercraft and fly in different directions, close to the ground, without running into obstacles,” said Prof. Srini.

“They would inspect the terrain for traces of water and ice and take images. Finally, when the batteries go out, they would land smoothly,” he added.

His team also created a robot that could steer through cluttered environments, a camera that can give panoramic, insect-like vision for robots, and surveillance cameras and an autonomous navigation system for helicopters, with help from the US Defence Advanced Projects Agency.

For his ground-breaking research, Prof. Srini was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science in 2006. In 2007, he was awarded the Queensland Smart State Premier’s Fellowship to continue his research in Queensland.

Prof. Srini’s earlier work on how bees fly without hitting other objects won the Australasian Science Prize in 2001 for its help in finding a way to provide pilotless helicopters.

Before coming to UQ, Prof. Srini headed a 20-strong team at the Australian National University where – for more than two decades – his laboratory produced some 180 publications, including 21 in high-impact journal articles in publications such as Nature, Science, PNAS, PLOS Biology and Current Biology

Abee would probably be the last thing that you would imagine when faced with navigational problems. Mandyam Srinivasan has spent almost a quarter of a century studying the visual processes of small insects to provide simple, novel solutions to problems in machine vision and robotics.

And the effort has paid off. After much acclaim from the scientific community and awards such as the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science (2006), Prof. Srinivasan was announced this year as Member

(AM) in the general division of the Order of Australia. This talented scientist is currently Professor of Visual Neuroscience at the Queensland Brain Institute and the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering of the University of Queensland.

Prof. Srinivasan owes his success largely, among other things, to bees. While to most of us, bees perform simple functions of buzzing around and fertilizing flowers for the more botanically minded, he has spent the past 20 years studying how honey bees detect, chase and intercept moving targets, avoid collisions, and land smoothly every time. His studies of the visual processes of these small insects have provided simple, novel solutions to problems in machine vision, navigational techniques and robotics.

“Based on what we have learned from the honey bee, we have been able to apply the same principles of control and navigation to unmanned aircraft. We can create smaller, cheaper and lighter models that can be used for surveillance out in the field,” explained Prof. Srini (as he prefers to be called). Although honey bees have been the main focus of Srini’s work over the years after “graduating from flies”, this intrepid scientist has also worked with budgerigars, and with facets of the human visuomotor system.

“Some of nature’s solutions are surprisingly simple and effective, because nature has been operating and evolving for millions of years,” he explained. “The way bees land on horizontal surfaces can

Prof Srini believes that insect systems have and will inspire many new, efficient and economical ways to achieve complicated engineering feats.

“Insect eyes have been studied for their efficiency in light absorption for developing optic fibres. Insects are being studied for their ability to navigate uneven terrain by walking on six legs. The efficiency of the ant colony working as a single unit is also being studied,” he said.

It’s little wonder then, that Srini’s work has been recognised by research contracts and grants from NASA and the US military, as well as the Australian military forces. The NASA project he worked on several years ago, involved mimicking the bee’s navigational skills to create light weight, low

Among his awards is the 2009 Distinguished Alumni Award of the Indian Institute of Science.

Prof. Srini was born in Pune and lived in Calcutta, Delhi and Bangalore. He acquired a PhD from Yale University and worked at the University of Zurich before moving to Australia in 1985.

What started as a one-person operation in honeybee vision in which he ran the whole outfit from beekeeping, designing and conducting experiments, analysis and interpretation of data and finally writing out his findings in papers, has now morphed into a full-fledged, multi-tasking team which has caught the attention of interested bodies both nationally and internationally.

With input from Sheryl Dixit