Automatically tracking and analyzing the behavior of live insect colonies

We introduce the study of live social insect colonies as a relevant and exciting domain for the development and application of multi-agent systems modeling tools. Social insects provide a rich source of traceable social behavior for testing multi-agent tracking, prediction and modeling algorithms. An additional benefit of this research is the potential for contributions to experimental biology — the principled techniques developed for analyzing artificial multi-agent systems can be applied to advance the state of knowledge of insect behavior. We contribute a novel machine vision system that addresses the challenge of tracking hundreds of small animals simultaneously. Fast color-based tracking is combined with movement-based tracking to locate ants in a real-time video stream. We also introduce new methods for analyzing the spatial activity of ant colonies. The system was validated in experiments with laboratory colonies of Camponotus festinatus and several example analyses of the ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: AGENTS
• Authors: Tucker R. Balch, Zia Khan, Manuela M. Veloso
• Keywords: AGENTS 2001, Multi-agent Systems, Security Privacy, Social Insect Colonies, Social Insects