New robot can interact socially with real lab rats

A team of roboticists at the Beijing Institute of Technology, working with a pair of colleagues from the Technical University of Munich, has created a new kind of rat robot—one that was designed to interact in social ways with real rats.

In their paper published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, the group describes how they used artificial intelligence to train their robot rat to behave like a real rat. Thomas Schmickl, with the University of Graz, Austria, has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue outlining how the team in China used feedback loops combined with AI-based reinforcement training to give the robot rats social skills that were strong enough to fool the real rats into interacting with them.

Science fiction books and movies have long promised humanoid robots capable of interacting with humans in ways that make the humans forget that the robots are not human. Such robots are shown as being able to do the kinds of work humans prefer to avoid and provide companionship.

In the real world, robots are not near having this level of ability. But scientists are working on it. In this new effort, the team in China set out to make a robot that could fool lab rats into thinking they were interacting with other real rats. And it appears they have succeeded.

Prior research has shown that behavior between rats can be aggressive or playful—rats will fight with each other if the situation becomes stressful. Happy rats, on the other hand, will roll around on the floor wrestling with each other or nuzzling with their snouts. For a robot to fool a rat, it would have to be able to do both, convincingly.

To give the robot rat some degree of rat personality, they gave it an AI deep learning app and then trained it using video of real rats doing what rats do when interacting. Over time, the robot rats learned how to behave when around other rats. And more than that, they kept learning after being exposed to real rats with positive reinforcement when things went according to plan.

The researchers ventured a bit from the rat model—they gave it a cart-like body with wheels instead of feet and legs. But the rest of it was very rat-like. Its spine, for example, could be twisted and turned like a real rat, and it could move its head like one, too. And its forelimbs could interact physically almost the same way as a real rat.

Testing showed that the robot rat was not only accepted by the real rats, but they would respond as expected —they would cower in fear when it appeared angry, for example, and wrestle and nestle with it just like they would do with their real cage mates during calmer moments. The research team concludes by suggesting the robots could be used as research agents to study social interactions and modulate the emotional states of real lab rats.

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