AI training: rat robot behaves like a real rat
Can a robot rat pretend to be a member of its own species? With the right artificial intelligence, it can.
The rat robot can fool a real rat into thinking it is a member of its own species.
(Image: Beijing Institute of Technology)
Roboticists from the Beijing Institute of Technology and scientists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a rat robot that has been trained with artificial intelligence (AI) to imitate the social behavior of biological rats. The aim is for robots to later learn social skills that could simplify cooperation with humans, for example.
Humanoid robots that are to be used in the household or work collaboratively with humans must meet minimum requirements for human behavior to function smoothly. However, in their study "Guanglu Jia et al,Modulating emotional states of rats through a rat-like robot with learned interaction patterns", published in Nature Machine Intelligence, the scientists from the Beijing Institute of Technology and the Technical University of Munich went one step further.
The researchers first wanted to find out whether it is possible to use AI to train a robot rat to adopt social behaviors so that it is accepted by real rats. To accomplish this, the robot rat must be able to imitate important behaviors of a real rat. These include two basic behaviors: In stressful situations, rats fight with each other; when they are happy, they wrestle and cuddle with each other and rub their snouts together.
The researchers initially developed a robot rat with parts from the 3D printer. The robot rat did not have to look particularly real. For example, the researchers limited themselves to making the rat robot move using wheels at the back of its body. Only the front part of the body and the front paws are designed in such a way that the robot rat can perform 95 percent similar movements to its biological model.
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Rat personality through AI training
To give the robot rat a rat personality, the scientists trained an AI using videos in which real rats interact with other rats of the same species. The researchers used deep reinforcement learning. The robotic rat gradually learned to behave like a real rat, for example, using its head, front body and front paws correctly during social interactions. Object recognition techniques were used to enable the robot rat to recognize and react to the behavior of real rats in real time. At the same time, the robot rat continued to learn from the social interactions.
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In laboratory tests with biological rats, the researchers were able to prove that the robot rat was accepted by the real rats because it moved and interacted appropriately as expected by its conspecifics in different situations.
(olb)
