RobotsEmploying robots inspired by animals to observe animals might sound counterintuitive, but it works

Sega, a Japanese toy-making company recently released a life-like robot cat. It’s a toy that looks like a toy or rather feels like a cat. Its moves around and reacts to touch exactly like a real-life cat. How can a toy mimic a living creatures’ behavior like real? Scientists have been working on understanding animal behavior, anatomy, and their physical and social behavior for ages. They have been largely successful in decoding it but for few exceptions. While animal-inspired robots have all the right cues from artificial intelligence, these robots are being deployed for understanding their predecessors in real life, too.

Watching animals employing some ingenious tactics on the Discovery channel will leave us in awe of nature and the technology deployed. Robotics too, as an application of technology, is being employed in understanding the finer nuances of nature. For, example studying group behavior has always been a challenge in the field of biology. According to a paper, “Application of robot-pigeon in ethological studies of bird flocks”, published in the Journal of Integrated Neuroscience, direct manipulation of flight trajectories by a robot-pigeon might be a useful casual tool to study the collective behavior of bird flocks.

Animals are peculiar subjects for ethologists, as animals cannot express their feelings in a way humans can understand. Moreover, 75% of animal species are yet to be named and described. Even those that humans know, do not perform on demand. Given the fact that animal research involves a lot of trial and error and waiting for certain conditions to happen, robots can effectively replace human agency in their tedious and exhaustive observational tasks. Employing robots inspired by animals to observe animals might sound counterintuitive, but it works. Scientists can isolate a certain variable, to experiment repeatedly for that particular variable, which otherwise is not possible in a real situation.

To demonstrate to what extent robotics is advancing evolution, or coevolution to be specific, here is an example. Scientists after discovering Californian squirrels have developed resistance towards rattlesnake venom, they have developed a robot squirrel to observe and identify interaction patterns between the two species. They observed that vigorous wagging motions of the tail kept rattlesnakes away. According to Rulon Clark, the person behind the research, the observations and studying of squirrel’s genome might someday lead to the invention of snake-bite treatment.

As Armando Simon, forensic psychologist argued that a serious study of cognition must include both the mind and the environment in which interacts, comparative psychology gains additional importance in ethology. Robbie, developed by Tim Landgraf, a roboticist at the Free University of Berlin is a classic example of what a biomimetic bot can achieve. Robbie is a real-looking bee bot, when released into the hive, could decipher the famous waggle dance of honeybees. While governments are using animal robots to prevent poaching, scientists are working on controlling animal behavior with tiny mobile robots, which they believe will help in making progress in areas like pollination, animal husbandry, etc. These developments signal far-reaching and positive changes in the way humans interact with the animal world, as long as provisions of robotics need not have to be invoked.