This project was created in Open Simulator for a university assignment. The task was to program a swarm of bees around a hive with the following features:
Beehive:
- The beehive will operate as a data centre where:
- Returning scout bees will submit the location and the fitness (quality of food) of any flower patches they have visited in the field.
- Directives will be given to bees according to the Bee’s algorithm (see video on Blackboard).
Twenty bees:
- Scout bees fly about randomly visiting flower patches in a radius that decays and converges on the hive over time (time at your discretion).
- Worker bees collect food from flower patches
Five flower patches:
- Each flower patch will have a different maximum fitness (quality of food) value.
- Flower patches will be distributed at random within a 20-meter radius about the hive.
Bees algorithm was used for this simulation in addition to Separation, Cohesion, Alignment and Wandering behaviors for the bees. The flower patches followed Blumberg’s top-up and decay model for their fitness values, where "Decay" corresponded to increase in fitness and "Top-Up" corresponded to bees extracting food.
Screenshots from the simulation are shown below. The yellow box in the middle represents the hive while the green boxes represent flower patches, with the brightness of the box representing its fitness value. The red spheroids represent scout bees while blue spheroids are the worker bees.
In the above screenshot we see worker bees clustered at the hive while scouts search for flower patches. In the screenshot below, we see that a flower patch has been found and the worker bees are collecting food from the patch and depositing it at the hive. The scouts continue to look for more patches.
