Follow the dummy: measuring the influence of a biomimetic robotic fish-lure on the collective decisions of a zebrafish shoal inside a circular corridor

Robotic agents that are accepted by animals as conspecifics are very powerful tools in behavioral biology because of the ways they help in studying social interactions in gregarious animals. In recent years, we have developed a biomimetic robotic fish lure for the purpose of studying the behavior of the zebrafish Danio rerio. In this paper, we present a series of experiments that were designed to assess the impact of some features of the lure regarding its acceptance among the fish. We developed an experimental setup composed of a circular corridor and a motorized rotating system able to steer the lure inside the corridor with a tunable linear speed. We used the fish swimming direction and distance between the fish and the lure as a metric to characterize the level of acceptance of the lure, depending on various parameters. The methodology presented and the experimental results are promising for the field of animal–robot interaction studies.