Robots mediating interactions between animals for interspecies collective behaviors

Abstract

Self-organized collective behavior has been analyzed in diverse types of gregarious animals. Such collective intelligence emerges from the synergy between individuals, which behave at their own time and spatial scales and without global rules. Recently, robots have been developed to collaborate with animal groups in the pursuit of better understanding their decision-making processes. These biohybrid systems make cooperative relationships between artificial systems and animals possible, which can yield new capabilities in the resulting mixed group. However, robots are currently tailor-made to successfully engage with one animal species at a time. This limits the possibilities of introducing distinct species-dependent perceptual capabilities and types of behaviors in the same system. Here, we show that robots socially integrated into animal groups of honeybees and zebrafish, each one located in a different city, allowing these two species to interact. This interspecific information transfer is demonstrated by collective decisions that emerge between the two autonomous robotic systems and the two animal groups. The robots enable this biohybrid system to function at any distance and operates in water and air with multiple sensorimotor properties across species barriers and ecosystems. These results demonstrate the feasibility of generating and controlling behavioral patterns in biohybrid groups of multiple species. Such interspecies connections between diverse robotic systems and animal species may open the door for new forms of artificial collective intelligence, where the unrivaled perceptual capabilities of the animals and their brains can be used to enhance autonomous decision-making, which could find applications in selective “rewiring” of ecosystems.

Social Integrating Robots Suggest Mitigation Strategies for Ecosystem Decay

“…Thus, in some sense, these robots need to exert control over their organismic counterparts. We identified that social interaction might be one of the key factors here, as social systems tend to be self-organising systems where modest modulation of a few actors (Halloy et al, 2007;Bonnet et al, 2018) or of some small-scale local environment (Bonnet et al, 2019) can already change the collective local densities, which is known to be a fundamental factor in ecological interactions: It is a longestablished fact that systems like predator-prey systems (Lotka, 1925;Volterra, 1926), host-parasite systems (Anderson and May, 1978), epidemic spread dynamics (Kermack and McKendrick, 1927), intra-specific competition (Verhulst, 1845), and interspecific competition (Smale, 1976) are strongly driven by local population densities, not only affecting population dynamics but also relevant for their future configuration through natural selection (Hardin, 1960). In short, there is no ecologically relevant interaction amongst organisms that is not affected by the local density distributions of organisms.…”

“…The zebrafish used in the studies here was approved by the state ethical board for animal experiments under authorisation number 2778 from the DCVA of Canton de Vaud, Switzerland. As described in Bonnet et al (2019) , we used 100 wild-type, short-fin zebrafish ( Danio rerio Hamilton 1822) with average length of 4 cm, sourced from Qualipet (Crissier, Switzerland). Each fish could be used in a maximum of one experiment per day, and all fish used were returned to their main tank at the end of the day, meaning that the same individuals could appear in multiple replicates of the studies presented here.…”

“…Trends in the empirical data, from N=8 repetitions ( Bonnet et al, 2018 ) are reflected in the model output. (B) Experiments with five fish and one fish robot that had an exogenously defined motion, switching direction in 1.4% of the time steps, reveals a correlation between the swimming direction of the fish group and the robot (empirical data from Bonnet et al, 2019 with N=24 repetitions). (D) Experiments with five fish and one fish robot that acted to reinforce the swimming direction of the fish group (empirical data from Bonnet et al, 2019 , with N=22 repetitions).…”

Behavioral Teleporting of Individual Ethograms onto Inanimate Robots: Experiments on Social Interactions in Live Zebrafish

“…Our concept of behavioral teleporting is related to two recent, independent breakthroughs by Bonnet and collaborators ( Bonnet et al., 2019 ) and Larsch and Baier ( Larsch and Baier, 2018 ). Bonnet and collaborators demonstrated the feasibility of remote interaction between zebrafish and honeybees in binary decision-making tasks through biologically-inspired robots (a zebrafish replica and two bee-robots).…”

“…Larsch and Baier demonstrated the possibility of establishing remote social interactions between zebrafish within a virtual reality setup, wherein projected dots instantaneously replicated the motion of independent subjects located in different tanks. Our approach combines these two strategies by affording the transfer of the complete ethogram of a zebrafish, similar to Larsch and Baier (2018) , onto a three-dimensional robotic replica, similar to Bonnet et al. (2019) .…”