A Miniature Mobile Robot Developed to be Socially Integrated with Species of Small Fish

A robot accepted by animals as conspecific is a very powerful tool in behavioral biology, particularly in studies of gregarious animals. In this paper we present the first results of acceptance of a robotic fish designed for experiments on collective animal behavior. The robot consists of two modules: a fish lure fixed on a magnetic base and a miniature mobile robot guiding the lure from below the experimental tank. In order to study the acceptance of the robot among living fish, we varied several parameters of the system and used design of experiments methods to reduce the number of performed experiments and determined the impact of each factor on the acceptance of the robot among a small group of real fish. While a brief comparison of the mean distance of the fish to the robot tends to indicate that the fish are attracted by the lure, a linear model of the acceptance of the robot is presented. Results of this study can be used to improve the design and control of the robot for further animal-robot interaction experiments

Development of a mobile robot to study the collective behavior of zebrafish

Frank Bonnet, Alexey Gribovskiy, Francesco Mondada, Philippe Rétornaz

A robot accepted by animals as conspecifics is a very powerful tool in behavioral biology, particularly in studies of gregarious animals. In this paper we present a robotic zebrafish designed for experiments on the collective animal behavior. The robot consists of two modules: a replica fish fixed on the magnetic base and a miniature mobile robot guiding the replica fish from below the experimental tank. The size of the mobile robot is 45x15x73 mm that makes it possible to use it in a group of robots forming a dense artificial fish school. The experiments showed that the robot can reach speed and acceleration maximums reported for zebrafish, thus its parameters satisfy the conditions necessary for the next step that will be interaction tests with the zebrafish.

Ieee2012

Shoaling with fish: using miniature robotic agents to close the interaction loop with groups of zebrafish Danio rerio

Frank Bonnet

Robotic animals are nowadays developed for various types of research, such as bio-inspired robotics, biomimetics and animal behavior studies. The miniaturization of technologies and the increase in performance of embedded systems allowed engineers to develop more powerful, sophisticated and miniature devices. The case of robotic fish is a typical example of such challenging design: the fish locomotion and body movements are difficult to reproduce and the device has to move autonomously underwater. More specifically, in the case of collective animal behavior research, the robotic device has to interact with animals by generating and exploiting signals relevant for social behavior. Once perceived by the animal society as conspecific, these robots can become powerful tools to study the animal behaviors, as they can at the same time monitor the changes in behavior and influence the collective choices of the animal society. In this work, we present novel robotized tools that can integrate shoals of fish in order to study their collective behaviors. This robotic platform is composed of two subsystems: a miniature wheeled mobile robot that can achieve dynamic movements and multi-robot long-duration experiments, and a robotic fish lure that is able to beat its tail to generate fish-like body movements. The two subsystems are coupled with magnets which allows the wheeled mobile robot to steer the robotic fish lure so that it reaches very high speeds and accelerations while achieving shoaling. An experimental setup to conduct studies on mixed societies of artificial and living fish was designed to facilitate the experiments for biologists. A software framework was also implemented to control the robots in a closed-loop using data extracted from visual tracking that retrieved the position of the robots and the fish. We selected the zebrafish Danio rerio as a model to perform experiments to qualify our system. We used the current state of the art on the zebrafish social behavior to define the specifications of the robots, and we performed stimuli analysis to improve their developments. Bio-inspired controllers were designed based on data extracted from experiments with zebrafish for the robots to mimic the zebrafish locomotion underwater. Experiments involving a robot with a shoal of fish in a constrained environment showed that the locomotion of the robot was one of the main factor to affect the collective behavior of zebrafish. We also shown that the body movements and the biomimetic appearance of the lure could increase its acceptance by fish. Finally, an experiment involving a mixed society of fish and robots qualified the robotic system to be integrated among a zebrafish shoal and to be able to influence the collective decisions of the fish. These results are very promising for the field of fish-robot interaction studies, as we showed the effect of the robots in long-duration experiments and repetitively, with the same order of response from the animals.

EPFL2017

Designing a socially integrated mobile robot for ethological research

Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Alexey Gribovskiy, Francesco Mondada

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.

2018

Shoaling with fish: using miniature robotic agents to close the interaction loop with groups of zebrafish Danio rerio

Frank Bonnet

EPFL2017