CHAbee

CHAbee is an open-source software framework for simulating and deploying swarm-intelligence robotic systems, with a focus on bee-inspired foraging, communication, and collective decision-making. The acronym CHAbee stands for Collaborative Hybrid Algorithm for Bee-inspired Exploration, reflecting its design goals of combining decentralized control with adaptive learning.

Development and scope: The project emerged from the swarm robotics community as a collaborative effort across universities and research labs. It provides a unified platform to model multiple robot roles, environments, and interaction rules, enabling reproducible experiments and real-world deployments.

Architecture and design: CHAbee comprises a core runtime, modular agent templates (scouts, foragers, nurses), a stigmergy-inspired indirect communication mechanism using pheromone-like signals, and connectors to simulation engines and hardware proxies. It supports 2D/3D environments and integrates with ROS for interoperability.

Algorithmic approach and features: The framework emphasizes decentralized task allocation, local sensing, and pheromone-based routing to coordinate exploration and resource collection. It includes reinforcement learning hooks to optimize policies and provides visualization and data logging for analysis.

Applications and reception: CHAbee is used in academic research on swarm robotics, environmental monitoring, search-and-rescue planning, and autonomous logistics. While widely adopted in simulations and prototype deployments, researchers note challenges in real-world scalability, parameter sensitivity, and the sim-to-real gap.