New robot can interact socially with real lab rats

A team of roboticists from the Beijing Institute of Technology, together with two colleagues from the Technical University of Munich, have created a new type of rat robot, designed to interact socially with real rats.

In their article published in the journal Natural artificial intelligence, the group describes how they used artificial intelligence to train their robot rat to behave like a real rat. Thomas Schmickl, of the University of Graz, Austria, published a News & Views article in the same journal issue describing how the team in China used feedback loops combined with AI-based reinforcement training to give robot rats strong enough social skills. to trick real rats into interacting with them.

Science fiction books and films have long promised humanoid robots capable of interacting with humans in ways that make them forget that robots are not human. Such robots are shown to be capable of performing the types of work that humans prefer to avoid and providing companionship.

In the real world, robots don’t come close to this level of capability. But scientists are working on it. In this new effort, the Chinese team set out to build a robot that could trick lab rats into thinking they were interacting with other real rats. And it seems they succeeded.

Previous research has shown that behavior between rats can be aggressive or playful: rats will fight if the situation becomes stressful. Happy rats, on the other hand, will roll around on the ground wrestling with each other or nuzzling each other. For a robot to fool a rat, it would have to be able to do both convincingly.

To give the robot rat some degree of rat personality, they gave it an AI deep learning application and then trained it using videos of real rats doing what rats do when they interact. Over time, the robot rats learned how to behave around other rats. And even more so, they continued to learn after being exposed to real rats with positive reinforcement when things went as expected.

The researchers ventured a bit from the rat model: they gave it a cart-shaped body with wheels instead of feet and legs. But the rest looked a lot like a rat. His spine, for example, could be twisted and turned like a real rat, and he could also move his head like one. And its forelimbs could physically interact in almost the same way as a real rat.

Tests showed that the robot rat was not only accepted by real rats, but that they reacted as expected: They would cower in fear when it seemed angry, for example, and would fight and huddle with it as they did. would do it with their real cage. friends during quieter times. The research team concludes by suggesting that robots could be used as research agents to study social interactions and modulate the emotional states of real laboratory rats.

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