Animal Robots being used for the Study of Animal behavior (VIDEOS)

 

As reading fiction can challenge us to better understand the fact, using fake animals can sometimes serve as our best solution to understanding the behavior of real animals. The use of dummies, doppelgangers, fakes, and physical models have served to elicit behaviors in animal experiments since the early history of behavior studies, and, more recently, robotic animals have been employed by researchers to further coax behaviors from their study subjects. 

The túngara frog (Physalaemus pustulosus) has been a study subject for investigating multimodal signalling (1). Multimodal signalling in animal behavior is when animals communicate with each other by using signals from different sensory modalities (2), like chemical odours, visual cues, auditory signals, etc

Photos:

VIDEO 1: Spying on Wildlife with Animal Robots

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VIDEO 3: Robot spy Pig meets Komodo dragons- It doesn't end Well! 

Video 4: 20 Amazing Robot Animals That Will Blow Your Mind

Sources: 1. Robots in the service of animal behavior (Barrett A. Klein, 1 ,* Joey Stein, 2 and Ryan C. Taylor 3. Commun Integr Biol. 2012 Sep 1; 5(5): 466–472.

2. Concept cited by: Otovic, P. & Partan, S.. (2010). Multimodal Signaling in Animals. Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. 1095-1105.