TY - JOUR
T1 - Influence of robotic shoal size, configuration, and activity on zebrafish behavior in a free-swimming environment
AU - Butail, Sachit
AU - Polverino, Giovanni
AU - Phamduy, Paul
AU - Del Sette, Fausto
AU - Porfiri, Maurizio
N1 - Funding Information:
We acknowledge the assistance from Vladislav Kopman and Pankaj Rajput in fabricating the robotic fish, and Fabrizio Ladu, Sarah Panitz, and Farihah Begum for independent verification and repair of the trajectory data. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant nos. CMMI-0745753, CMMI-1129820, DRL-1200911, and DGE-0741714 . Additional support has been provided in part by the Honors Center of Italian Universities (H2CU) through a scholarship to F. Del Sette.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2014/11/1
Y1 - 2014/11/1
N2 - In animal studies, robots have been recently used as a valid tool for testing a wide spectrum of hypotheses. These robots often exploit visual or auditory cues to modulate animal behavior. The propensity of zebrafish, a model organism in biological studies, toward fish with similar color patterns and shape has been leveraged to design biologically inspired robots that successfully attract zebrafish in preference tests. With an aim of extending the application of such robots to field studies, here, we investigate the response of zebrafish to multiple robotic fish swimming at different speeds and in varying arrangements. A soft real-time multi-target tracking and control system remotely steers the robots in circular trajectories during the experimental trials. Our findings indicate a complex behavioral response of zebrafish to biologically inspired robots. More robots produce a significant change in salient measures of stress, with a fast robot swimming alone causing more freezing and erratic activity than two robots swimming slowly together. In addition, fish spend more time in the proximity of a robot when they swim far apart than when the robots swim close to each other. Increase in the number of robots also significantly alters the degree of alignment of fish motion with a robot. Results from this study are expected to advance our understanding of robot perception by live animals and aid in hypothesis-driven studies in unconstrained free-swimming environments.
AB - In animal studies, robots have been recently used as a valid tool for testing a wide spectrum of hypotheses. These robots often exploit visual or auditory cues to modulate animal behavior. The propensity of zebrafish, a model organism in biological studies, toward fish with similar color patterns and shape has been leveraged to design biologically inspired robots that successfully attract zebrafish in preference tests. With an aim of extending the application of such robots to field studies, here, we investigate the response of zebrafish to multiple robotic fish swimming at different speeds and in varying arrangements. A soft real-time multi-target tracking and control system remotely steers the robots in circular trajectories during the experimental trials. Our findings indicate a complex behavioral response of zebrafish to biologically inspired robots. More robots produce a significant change in salient measures of stress, with a fast robot swimming alone causing more freezing and erratic activity than two robots swimming slowly together. In addition, fish spend more time in the proximity of a robot when they swim far apart than when the robots swim close to each other. Increase in the number of robots also significantly alters the degree of alignment of fish motion with a robot. Results from this study are expected to advance our understanding of robot perception by live animals and aid in hypothesis-driven studies in unconstrained free-swimming environments.
KW - Animal-robot interaction
KW - Behavior
KW - Robot
KW - Zebrafish
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U2 - 10.1016/j.bbr.2014.09.015
DO - 10.1016/j.bbr.2014.09.015
M3 - Article
C2 - 25239605
AN - SCOPUS:84907808370
SN - 0166-4328
VL - 275
SP - 269
EP - 280
JO - Behavioural Brain Research
JF - Behavioural Brain Research
ER -