A robotic rat on wheels has learned how to interact with real rats while mimicking the rodents’ play and fight behaviours.
“[The] robotic rats have similar appearances and movements to animals, and even the same odour,” says at the Beijing Institute of Technology in China. “It has become an important tool for exploring individual or collective rats’ behavioural responses.”
The robotic rat, which Shi and his colleagues developed, has two front arms, a bionic spine capable of bending into many different body postures, and wheels instead of hind legs to boost the robot’s speed. They also used the artificial intelligence to train the robot to mimic real rat behaviours, including aggressive pinning, playful pouncing and social sniffing or nose touches. To increase the chance that the robot rodent was socially accepted, the researchers also coated it in rat urine.
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They then ran a series of three half-hour trials in which the robot rat interacted with a real rodent. The robotic rat used an onboard camera to visually detect and track the real rat before approaching it for an aggressive or friendly social interaction – while observing the rat’s reactions to improve its own future displays of social behaviours.
The experiments showed that the real rats emitted more vocal alarm sounds when being pinned by the robot, as expected. But the rats also expressed more positive sounds when the robot was engaged in playful pouncing or touching noses, and generally seemed at ease when approaching the robot.
It isn’t easy to convince a “highly intelligent and highly cognitive animal like a rat to consider the robot as a member of its own species”, says at the University of Graz in Austria. There have been other robotic rat designs, but he described this one as “a different league” because of its AI training, he says.
Ultimately, robotic rats could improve the well-being of real rats by providing social companionship in the lab without the danger of a live rat’s aggression, says Schmickl.
Nature Machine Intelligence
