Training Turtles With Parasitic Robots

Researchers can control the movements of a turtle through a parasitic robot mounted on its carapace.

AsianScientist (May 24, 2017) – By imitating the relationship between parasites and hosts, a research team from the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (KAIST) has developed a hybrid animal-robot system for waypoint navigation. Their results have been published in the Journal of Bionic Engineering.

Even with remarkable technological advancements, robots that operate in complex and harsh environments still face serious limitations in moving and recharging. In contrast, millions of years of evolution have given rise to many animals with excellent locomotion skills that enable them to survive in the natural environment.

Certain kinds of parasites can manipulate the behavior of the host to increase the probability of its own reproduction. Similarly, the team led by Professor Lee Phil-Seung proposed using a “parasitic robot” to guide the behavior of an animal host.

The team chose a turtle as their first host animal and designed a parasitic robot that could induce the turtle’s object-tracking behavior through repeated training sessions. The robot guides the turtle using LEDs and feeds it snacks as a reward for going in the right direction through a programmed algorithm.

After training sessions lasting five weeks, the parasitic robot could successfully control the direction of movement of the host turtles during a navigation task in a water tank.

This hybrid animal–robot interaction system could provide an alternative solution of the limitations of conventional mobile robot systems in various fields. First author of the study, PhD candidate Kim Dae-Gun, said that there are a wide variety of animals including mice, birds, and fish that could perform equally as well at such tasks. He said that in the future, this system could be applied to various exploration and reconnaissance missions that humans and robots find it difficult to do on their own.

“This hybrid animal-robot interaction system could provide an alternative solution to the limitations of conventional mobile robot systems in various fields, and could also act as a useful interaction system for the behavioral sciences,” Kim added.



The article can be found at: Kim et al. (2017) Parasitic Robot System for Waypoint Navigation of Turtle.

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Source: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
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