NSF Award
1926806
The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project safeguards domestic food supply by improving honeybee health. Honeybees pollinate 1/3 of domestic food supply and contribute more than $15 billion to the U.S. economy. Although honeybee populations are at a 20-year high in the U.S., the cost to keep them alive is at its historical peak. This project reduces labor costs for commercial beekeepers, allowing them to devote more time to restoring hives that show signs of poor health and infestation. The product can be used to optimize hive placement, allowing growers to pollinate using the smallest number of hives. As growers' demand for hives decreases, the number of hives shipped across the country to pollinate crops will be reduced, resulting in a more robust stock of commercial honeybees.<br/><br/>This proposed project expands on research developed in Phase I to grow the product from its first version into a scalable product, which includes predictive model improvements, additional data collection, mobile app development and additional field testing. A major component of the Phase II grant will be improving accuracy and performance of the hive strength model. Additional data collection will be important in Phase II to improve the model to perform well in a wider range of ambient conditions. By the end of Phase II, full automation of the software allows for the product to be used at all times. A major component of the Phase II work will be the development of a web-based mobile application that can take infrared pictures using smartphone camera attachments, upload images automatically to a database, and provide real time analytics on the images. This project is a breakthrough in the crop pollination space using infrared imagery that can be adapted to improve thermodynamic insights across many verticals.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
