Designing a socially integrated mobile robot for ethological research

A robot introduced into an animal group, accepted by the animals as conspecifics, and capable of interacting with them is an ecient tool for ethological research, particularly in studies of collective and social behaviour. In this paper, we present the implementation of an autonomous mobile robot developed by the authors to study group behaviour of chicks of the domestic chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus). We discuss the design of the robot and of the experimental framework that we built to run animal-robot experiments. The robot design was experimentally validated, we demonstrated that the robot can be socially integrated into animal groups. The designed system extends the current state of the art in the field of animal-robot interaction in general and the birds study in particular by combining such advantages as (1) the robot being a part of the group, (2) the possibility of mixed multi-robot, multi-animal groups, and (3) close-loop control of robots. It opens new opportunities in the study of behaviour in domestic fowl by using mobile robots; being socially integrated into the animal group, robots can profit from the positive feedback mechanism that plays key roles in animal collective behaviour. They have potential applications in various domains, from pure scientific research to applied areas such as control and ensuring welfare of poultry.

Multi-robot control and tracking framework for bio-hybrid systems with closed-loop interaction

Frank Bonnet, Alexey Gribovskiy, Francesco Mondada

Bio-mimetic robots can interact with groups of animals in bio-hybrid systems to study their behaviour by producing calibrated stimuli and by analysing their responses. Integrating a group of robots into a group of animals to mimic their behaviour is challenging, both in terms of robotic hardware design and robot control. In particular, the robots must be able to react in real-time to the animal changes of behaviour. This implies the need to adequately track and identify animal behaviour. In this paper, we present a novel framework to control several bio-mimetic robots to integrate into groups of fish. Our framework is able to track the position of the fish and robots in real-time. The robots are driven by a bio-mimetic model of fish behaviour from the literature. We show that our multi-robot system can successfully integrate into groups of fish with closed-loop interactions between the robots and the fish.

2017

Towards Mixed Societies of Chickens and Robots

Hannes Bleuler, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Alexey Gribovskiy, Francesco Mondada

To design, to study, and to control mixed animals-robots societies is a challenging field of scientific exploration that can bring new frameworks to study individual and collective behaviors in animal and mixed robot-animal societies. In the Chicken Robot project we aim at developing a mobile robot, able to collaborate with a group of chicks and to control certain group behaviors. The first research step is to build formal models of relevant animal behaviors by performing ethological experiments. Hence, one of the principal tasks is to design a setup equipped with appropriate monitoring tools. In this paper, we present a toolset for running chick-robot experiments and analyzing results. It includes an autonomous PoulBot robot and an experimental setup, able to autonomously record experimental video and audio data, to detect displacements of chicks and robots, to detect their calling activity and to provide robots with these data. We also present a visual data analysis system to extract behavioral features of individual chicks using the variational Bayesian Gaussian mixture model classification with a particle filters based prediction of future positions of chicks. We show how these tools are currently used to carry out chick-robot experiments, to collect behavioral data and to extract animal behavioral features that allow us to build behavioral models bound to be implemented in the robot.

IEEE Press2010

The PoulBot: a mobile robot for ethological studies on domestic chickens

Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Alexey Gribovskiy, Francesco Mondada

This paper presents the ”Mixed Societies of Robots and Vertebrates” project that is carried out by the Mobile Robotics group at EPFL, Switzerland in collaboration with the Unit of Social Ecology at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. The idea of the project is to study behavior in young chicks of the domestic chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) by using mobile robots able to interact with animals and accepted as members of an animal group. In contrast to other studies where relatively simple robotic devices are used to test specific biological hypotheses, we aim to design a multipurpose robot that will allow ethologists to study more sophisticated phenomena by providing a wide range of sensors and sufficient computational power. In this paper we present a PoulBot robot and give an example of the ethological experiment, where it is used to study the social aggregation in chick groups.

2010