How to Blend a Robot Within a Group of Zebrafish: Achieving Social Acceptance Through Real-Time Calibration of a Multi-level Behavioural Model

Abstract

We have previously shown how to socially integrate a fish robot into a group of zebrafish thanks to biomimetic behavioural models. The models have to be calibrated on experimental data to present correct behavioural features. This calibration is essential to enhance the social integration of the robot into the group. When calibrated, the behavioural model of fish behaviour is implemented to drive a robot with closed-loop control of social interactions into a group of zebrafish. This approach can be useful to form mixed-groups, and study animal individual and collective behaviour by using biomimetic autonomous robots capable of responding to the animals in long-standing experiments. Here, we show a methodology for continuous real-time calibration and refinement of multi-level behavioural model. The real-time calibration, by an evolutionary algorithm, is based on simulation of the model to correspond to the observed fish behaviour in real-time. The calibrated model is updated on the robot and tested during the experiments. This method allows to cope with changes of dynamics in fish behaviour. Moreover, each fish presents individual behavioural differences. Thus, each trial is done with naive fish groups that display behavioural variability. This real-time calibration methodology can optimise the robot behaviours during the experiments. Our implementation of this methodology runs on three different computers that perform individual tracking, data-analysis, multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, simulation of the fish robot and adaptation of the robot behavioural models, all in real-time.

Robots mediating interactions between animals for interspecies collective behaviors

“…One can also envision future applications in which the robotic systems would be able to learn and to adapt their behavior to animal species. Elsewhere, we have already begun to explore these possibilities in the two individual biohybrid systems (40,41) based on methodology for continuous real-time adaptation of multilevel behavioral models by evolutionary algorithms. We envision robotic systems that can discover by themselves new properties of biohybrid artificial intelligence toward synthetic transitions (42) and organic computing devices (43), where robots could passively evolve among animals.…”

Strategies to modulate zebrafish collective dynamics with a closed-loop biomimetic robotic system

“…It also confirms the hypothesis that 'bold' behaviour is sufficient to explain the variations observed in the distribution of leadership of Danio rerio. This conclusion goes further than our previous work with autonomous robots [14], [30], [15]. Indeed, the initiations of collective departures have never been explicitly simulated by a fish robot before.…”

Beyond Bio-Inspired Robotics: How Multi-Robot Systems Can Support Research on Collective Animal Behavior

“…Despite these difficulties, the conduct of such experiments is still important, especially in the case of gregarious animals and is an aspect of collective behavior that cannot be studied using simulations and mathematical models alone ( Romano et al, 2019 ). In light of these concerns, a large amount of work has gone into studying the different factors that allow a robot to be socially accepted by a group ( Abaid et al, 2012 ; Polverino et al, 2012 ; Cazenille et al, 2018a ; Cazenille et al, 2018b ; Li et al, 2021 ). Similar work has also been done to investigate an animal’s response to stimuli in virtual environments ( Baldauf et al, 2008 ; Stowers et al, 2017 ; Naik et al, 2020 ).…”