University of Constance researchers have unveiled a cutting-edge facility called SMART-BARN, which allows them to study the group behavior of animals. Housed in an 18th-century barn and a gymnasium-sized Imaging Hangar, SMART-BARN uses high-throughput techniques like optical and acoustic tracking to monitor animals in 3D, enabling researchers to study behaviors and interactions that were previously impossible to capture in lab settings. This state-of-the-art technology has far-reaching applications, ranging from biology to artificial intelligence.
SMART-BARN, which stands for Scalable Multimodal Arena for Real-time Tracking Behaviour of Animals in large numbers, is a multidisciplinary system developed by biologists, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists. It can simultaneously monitor hundreds, or even thousands, of animals depending on their size. The technology has already been applied to study various species including pigeons, starlings, moths, bats, and humans.
The transformation of the former barn into a technology lab for complex behavioral analysis has been a major breakthrough for researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour (CASCB) and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. The barn has also served as a prototype for the largest swarm behavior lab at the University of Konstanz, known as the Imaging Hangar.
One of the major limitations in behavioral research has been the inability to study animals under realistic and large-scale environments. Researchers either had to study animals in highly controlled lab settings or in uncontrolled conditions in the wild. SMART-BARN addresses this limitation by providing a large space and state-of-the-art technology to closely examine the group behavior of animals.
SMART-BARN allows researchers to study complex behavioral traits of individuals as well as interactions between groups of animals like insects, birds, and mammals. Through high-throughput measurement techniques like optical and acoustic tracking, researchers can study the exact 3D position and posture of animals and calculate their field of view. The system’s modular nature allows users to perform different experimental paradigms, providing flexibility in research.
The scalability of SMART-BARN is a crucial aspect, as it enhances the scale of indoor behavioral experiments by offering more experimental volume, measured behavior traits, and larger group sizes. Depending on the size of the animals, the facility can host hundreds of animals simultaneously, expanding the possibility of experiments to novel species that are typically not studied in indoor environments.
The applications of SMART-BARN have been diverse so far, involving subjects such as pigeons, starlings, moths, bats, and even humans. The facility has created new interdisciplinary collaborations and is shaping important research initiatives. Researchers can track the 3D gaze and posture of birds in groups, explore the role of gaze in decision-making, and design novel computer vision and AI-based algorithms for tracking animals without markers.
The team behind SMART-BARN envisions it as a collaborative space where researchers from around the world can contribute to the exploration of behavioral questions. They invite researchers to connect with them and plan experiments using this state-of-the-art facility.
The research article describing SMART-BARN, titled “SMART-BARN: Scalable Multimodal Arena for Real-time Tracking Behavior of Animals in large Numbers,” is published in Science Advances and showcases the fast, robust acquisition of movement, behavior, communication, and interactions of animals in groups within a large, three-dimensional environment using multiple information channels. The diverse capabilities of SMART-BARN are demonstrated through three avian case studies, highlighting its potential for fine-scale analysis of collective animal behavior across species.