The Robotics, Autonomous Systems, and Controls Laboratory at University of California-Davis builds robotic models of animals that help them “study biological hypotheses in animal behavior by trying to mimic the behavior of animals.”
A few years ago, they created a Rat Robot. Yes, New Yorkers, you heard that right. Your greatest nightmare. Crispin Glover’s biggest dream.
What is particularly interesting is how the Rat Robots altered their behavior based on the limitations of their environment.
Researchers recorded the behavior of baby rats in enclosed rectangular environments and saw that the rat pups, almost blind and deaf, didn’t move much after hitting the walls of their cages. They decided to build rat-like robots, inject them some software and rules, and see what will come from this. Surprisingly, they saw that their robots didn’t follow their software rules and started unexpected movements, such as circling the rectangular arena after a shock into a wall. This led them to revisit the original animal data and to conclude that baby rats also had similar behaviors even if they didn’t pay attention to it previously. Now the researchers want to give different sets of rules to their rat-like robots to predict the behavior or more sophisticated robots — and also the rats’ one.
Robot Rat
In Universal Robots, Peroutka (played by the wise-cracking, yet very sweet Ben Sulzbach) and Rossum (played by the phenomenal Nancy Sirianni) also discover their creations don’t always follow the rules.
