Perception and Behavior of InsBot : Robot-Animal
Interaction Issues
Fabien Taˆche, Masoud Asadpour, Gilles Caprari, Walter Karlen, Roland Siegwart
Autonomous Systems Lab (http://asl.epfl.ch)
Ecole Polytechnique Fe´de´rale de Lausanne (EPFL)
CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Email: {fabien.tache, masoud.asadpour, gilles.caprari, walter.karlen, roland.siegwart}@epfl.ch
Abstract— This paper describes the hardware and behavior
implementation of a miniature robot, in size of a match box, that
is able to interact with cockroaches. The robot is equipped with
two micro-processors dedicated to hardware processing and be-
havior generation. It is also equipped with 12 infra-red proximity
sensors, 2 light sensors, a linear camera and a battery that allows
3 hours autonomy. The robot can discriminate cockroaches, other
robots, environment boundaries and shelters. It has also three
means of communication: a wireless module for monitoring and
logging, an IR remote receiver for fast supervision of biological
experiment and a simple local communication protocol via infra-
red proximity sensors to detect robots in short range.
I. INTRODUCTION
Over the last decades, researchers in bio-inspired robotics
have mimicked animals to design hardware and software
structure of the robots. The RobotV [1], RHex [2], Biobot [3],
HEL-roach [4] and the hexapod micro-robot [5] are examples
of legged-robots which have been mechanically inspired by
cockroaches.
Some researches have also developed hybrid robots by
mixing the artificial and biological systems. The PheGMot-
III [6] by Nagasawa et al. uses real cockroach antennas as
a chemical sensor to follow pheromone tracks. Holzer [7]
designed a system which controls the cockroaches’ actuators
by electric stimulation.
Instead of building exactly the same mechanism as animals,
short-term goal of our work is to have robots which integrate
into a society of animals, live inside the society and interact
with them. Since the focus of our work is in collective-level,
there is no need to have the same appearance as animals but the
functionality of the robot must permit it to statistically produce
the same collective behavior as animals e.g. to aggregate with
the same probability distribution for duration of stay with
respect to the number of animals around.
This means that not only the animals behavior is affected
by the robots and other animals but also the robots behavior
is affected by interactions with the animals and other robots
in the collection. In fact every decision is made collectively
by the whole system and a top-level observer of collective
behaviors must not see any difference between the animal
society and the mixed one. In our model the animal is thus
considered as a black box and the important characteristics
for our robot is to fit in the mathematical model of collective
interactions among individuals involved in the group.
The long-term goal of the project is, once the robots
are accepted to the society of animals, to manipulate the
collective response of the society by modulating the behavioral
parameters of robots. We hope then to propose guidelines
towards a general methodology for performing such a control
on mixed-societies.
Among the projects that are related to our work, there is the
Robot Sheepdog [8] that controls a flock of ducks by moving
them safely to a pre-determined position. Also, the W-M6 rat-
like robot [9] by Ishii et al. tries to create a symbiosis between
creature and robot by teaching a rat to push a lever to access
a food source. These projects are different from what we are
investigating in that their robots are not trying to integrate into
the society. Instead they are trying to affect or supervise the
society in a centralized manner.
Bo¨hlen developed a robot [10] that interacts with three
chickens in a cage. He manipulates some techniques to me-
chanically reduce chickens’ anxiety towards moving machin-
ery. The goal of the robot is to integrate with chickens but
does not try to affect their behavior.
The present work is a part of the European project
LEURRE, which aims to study mixed-societies of animals and
robots. This multi-disciplinary project gathers the competence
of biologists, ethologists, chemists and engineers coming from
different European universities: Universite´ Libre de Bruxelles,
Universite´ Paul Sabatier, Universite´ de Rennes and Ecole Poly-
technique Fe´de´rale de Lausanne. The preliminary tests and
developments are done with mixed-societies of cockroaches
and robots.
In this project, our team is mainly involved in designing
and building the robots and of course all tools that are needed
to work efficiently with them. Another important task is to
program the behaviors according to the models developed by
the biologists. The resulting system is a useful toolbox for
biological researches.
The current paper is organized as follows: first, the required
functionality of our insect-like robot, the InsBot (reflected
also in our previous paper [11]) is summarized in section II.
Then we focus on the sensory devices for optimal environment
detection, taking into account the hardware limitations of the
robot (section III). It is followed by the architecture of the