Creating Connections: Bed bugs to UAV Swarms

Modern aerospace systems need a new approach for swarm consensus that is distributed, operates with local knowledge, and uses simple agents. The overarching goal of our research is to advance our understanding of bed bug behavior and use this understanding to improve performance of aerospace swarms. The first step is to understand individual bed bug response to stimuli (CO₂, heat, light) and individual neural characteristics, before considering group dynamics. The objective of this research was to establish a collaboration between biologists and engineers at ERAU to design and implement a test-platform to enable new data collection for bed bug movement. This collaboration begins by examining individual bed bug response to CO₂ concentration. Our central hypothesis is that if we record bed bug response to CO­₂ exposure, then we will be able to improve our understanding of collective decision making because the bed bugs coordinate their response to environmental conditions. The research involved five undergraduate students from three campuses.