There are people who fear robots taking over our lives. But it is not only human life in which robots will play a more and more prominent role. Also, lab animal life changes because of robotics. The field of "ethorobotics" grows: more and more experiments use robots to trigger and analyze certain behavioral responses of their study object. The paper of Kim et al. (2018) mentions robot studies which examine e.g. honeybee dance communication, bird courtship, fish schooling and the social behavior of rats. So the idea is to put a robot which simulates a certain behavior and look how living organisms are reacting to it. Many of these studies use “open-loop control”: the behavior of robot is pre-programmed and can not respond to the behavior of the live object. In contrast, “closed-loop control” systems allow the robot to interact in real-time with live subjects based on feedback from the animal behavior. Kim et al. developed a "closed-loop control" system in which a robotic arm moves a 3D printed zebra-fish replica in response to the behavior of a living zebrafish in its 3D water environment. They were able to show, that when replica and living original are in separate tanks which allow the zebrafish to watch the movement of the robot, the zebrafish seeks the closeness of the replica more often when its movement in one direction (y-axis) is closed-loop controlled compared to a complete open-loop controlled system. The increased shoaling time can be interpreted as an improved degree of biomimicry. Unfortunately, full 3D closed-loop control did not increase the replica performance. Kim et al. argue that this could be because of the increased probability of the replica to crash against the wall when all 3 axes are controlled by the living behavior. Maybe that wall crashing was interpreted as aggressive behavior and therefore induced avoidance behavior in the living fish. So the system is maybe not perfect yet, but it shows a new interactive robotics-based approach for zebrafish behavioural phenotyping in 3D .
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