Robot science turns to nature for inspiration

Julie Steenhuysen, Yahoo News 15 Nov 07;

To build a better robot, scientists increasingly are looking to nature, making robots that move and interact socially with cockroaches, slither like a salamander and even learn and make decisions like humans.

The new designs, reported on Thursday in the journal Science, suggest that robot science is finally catching up with science fiction.

One team of European researchers led by Jose Halloy of the University Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, created cockroach-sized robots that interacted with their living counterparts.

While they did not look like cockroaches, they were coated with chemicals to make them smell like cockroaches.

And they behaved like robots, so much so that they influenced their roach clan into making a bad choice of shelter, choosing a light shelter rather than a darker one.

"What is new here is that the robot is autonomous, it is not remote-controlled by humans, and it acts at the social level in a group living insects," Halloy said in an e-mail.

By changing some parameters, the robotic cockroaches infiltrated the group and influenced its behavior.

"We see them as a tool to explore decision-making mechanisms in group-living animals," Halloy said.

ROBOTS WITH BRAINS

The study is part of a bigger effort to create robots that can respond flexibly to changes in the environment.

Gerald Edelman of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, has spent the past 20 years working on brain-based devices that simulate the activity of the human brain.

"Of course, the number of neurons and synapses is much smaller. But if you do the thing right, it actually does function for sophisticated purposes, such as perception and episodic memory," Edelman said in a telephone interview.

Because the brain learns by interacting with the environment, building a robot that can learn must incorporate this process. "It's not a brain in a vat. It's the interaction of the body and the environment that counts," he said.

Edelman, writing in Science, describes Darwin VII, a brain-based robot fitted with a video camera for vision, microphones for hearing and a gripper device that can sense how well different steel blocks conduct electricity, a process that functions as a sense of taste.

Darwin VII could learn which blocks had a good taste -- they offered a type of reward -- and which had a bad taste, in an experiment that replicated a value system.

A subsequent version, Darwin X, learned how to find a hidden platform, replicating a common rat study in which they must find a submerged platform in a maze of milky fluid.

In this case, Darwin's infrared detector sent a reward signal each time it passed over the platform. After training, Darwin could go to the platform from any point in the maze.

Edelman said this process can be studied to understand how the brain learns.

In a review of biologically inspired devices, Rolf Pfeifer of the University of Zurich describes robot insects, spiders, snakes, lobsters, dogs, monkeys and humans.

Such robots, Pfeifer suggests, offer the opportunity to study different patterns of movement, locomotion, navigation, orientation, manipulation, imitation and cooperation.

Ultimately, he wrote, these might result in machines that are "adaptable, robust, versatile and agile."

"Exciting times are ahead of us," he wrote.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Sandra Maler)

Scientists use robotic bugs to change cockroach behavior
Yahoo News 16 Nov 07

Roach-sized robots that scientists introduced into real roach colonies were able to change the bugs' group behavior, a study released Thursday found.

"While this kind of behavior has been seen in groups of living animals ranging from insects to vertebrates, this study shows that autonomous robots can be used to study and control group behavior," said Jose Halloy and colleagues in the study published in the November 16 issue of Science.

Halloy, of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, and his co-authors used robots similar to cockroaches in size but not shape, and which were coated to mimic a natural cockroach exterior cuticle.

They introduced the minority robots which, with the majority cockroaches, together determined the choice of shelter.

The scientists said robots controlled the collective decision-making process and yielded a behavior -- the choice of an inappropriate shelter -- not observed in groups of cockroaches alone.

"These results demonstrate the possibility of using intelligent autonomous devices to study and control self-organized behavioral patterns in group-living animals," Halloy and co-authors added.


Robo-Roaches Can Control Insect Groups
Susan Brown, National Geographic News 15 Nov 07;

Cockroaches will often choose shelter unwisely when under the influence of robots, a new study shows.

Usually when the creepy crawlers are let loose in a brightly lit area, they gather under the darkest shade they can find.

"Nice means dark, for a cockroach," said lead study author Jose Halloy, a social ecologist at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium. "They look for shadows."

But when the bugs were joined by tiny robots designed to smell and behave like roaches, the machines were able to control the insects' behavior.

If the robots lingered beneath a less desirable, more brightly lit shelter, for example, the cockroaches did too—a choice they rarely made when the robots weren't around.

The findings show that such robots can influence group behavior in animals, the authors report in this week's issue of the journal Science.

This means that the tiny machines could be valuable tools in helping to understand how animals that move in swarms make collective decisions.

Scent of a Cockroach

The robots used for the experiment were about the same size as cockroaches, but they looked more like toy cars than insects.

Although cockroaches perceive light levels well, they don't recognize each other by sight, Halloy said. Instead, they rely on smell.

So Halloy and his colleagues dressed the little robots with cockroach-scented paper.

The team then programmed the robots to behave according to a simple set of rules derived from watching groups of cockroaches crawling around a test arena.

Based on their observations, the team figured out that the bugs wander randomly.

If roaches stumble into darkness, they take a break. If a few other cockroaches are nearby under this shelter, they rest longer.

Following these rules, most of the cockroaches eventually assemble under a single shelter, even if another identical shelter is available.

If one shelter casts darker shade than another, the insects gather in the darkest one most of the time.

Initially the researchers had the robots follow these observed rules, so that the bots and the bugs both wound up under the darkest shade in most cases.

For the final round of tests, the team released groups of 12 cockroaches and four robots into an arena with two shades, one darker than the other.

But this time the team programmed the machines to pause beneath the brighter of the two shelters.

Under the influence of the robots, the cockroaches gathered under the brighter shelter more than twice as often as they did when the robots followed regular cockroach rules.

"It's an interesting piece of work," said Ronald Arkin, who studies robot swarms at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

"They have influenced gregarious animals to change their behavior in ways consistent with the [robot] designers' intent."

Robot Ethics

Halloy and his group will next try to get hatchling chicks to accept a robot as their leader by taking advantage of their inclination to bond with moving objects.

If that works, the researchers will watch to see how the relationship between animal and machine develops.

Halloy noted that has no plans to design robots to interact with humans.

"I must confess that we are not interested in human behavior," he said.

But other experts are, and they say that experiments like Halloy's raise the question of whether robots could be designed to alter the ways humans interact.

Once humans begin interacting with robots more, they may influence us in ways we're not aware of, said Georgia Tech's Arkin, who also co-chairs an international committee that is encouraging discussion about robot ethics.

"We have to think about those issues especially when dealing with human involvement," Arkin said.

"Cockroaches I'm much less concerned about."