An Introduction To Ethorobotics
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An Introduction to Ethorobotics
This pioneering text explores the emerging discipline of ethorobotics which brings together the fields of animal behaviour and robotics. It encourages closer collaboration between behavioural scientists and engineers to facilitate the creation of robots with a higher degree of functionality in animal/human environments and to broaden understanding of animal behaviour in new and intriguing ways. Utilising the knowledge of key ethologists and roboticists in the field today, this book is divided into four major parts. The first part is written for those with little or no background in the biology of animal behaviour, particularly for those coming from an engineering background seeking an accessible introduction to the field and how it can be applied to robotic behaviour. Topics include problem solving in animals, social cognition, and communication (visual, acoustic, olfactory, etc.). The second part is an introduction to the basic construction of robots for non‐engineers, and the possibilities offered by current technical achievements and their limitations to the study of animal behaviour. The third part explores the core theme of ethorobotics, the basic framework of the discipline, the field’s evolution, and current topics including ethical considerations, autonomy, to ‘living’ social robots. The fourth and final chapter looks at ethorobotics in practice through key research projects which have had the biggest impact. This is a ground‐breaking interdisciplinary text which will appeal to upper‐level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers focusing on animal behaviour and cognition, as well as those undertaking courses in engineering, social robotics, biologically inspired robotics, AI, and human–robot and animal–robot interactions.
Designing Self-Organization in the Physical Realm
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Animal-friendly methods for rodent behavioral testing in neuroscience research
Rodent behavioral testing has been used to study brain functions since the 1890s and has become a gold-standard model in modern neuroscience. Up to the 1950s, most behavioral tests on laboratory rodent models were based on punishments and rewards. Both approaches can lead to a certain degree of animal pain or suffering. Punishments involved the employment of painful stimuli, typically electric shocks. Passive avoidance and fear conditioning tests, among the most widely used behavioral paradigms used to evaluate learning and memory in rodents, can be performed using only a single brief shock. Other tests, such as the active avoidance, might require up to tens or hundreds of shocks, strongly challenging the psychological welfare of the model animals. On the other hand, tests based on rewards, which apparently may seem more ethical, actually still induce suffering in the animals, as food rewards are almost always associated with a food restriction protocol, in order to motivate food-seeking behavior. Rodents are starved for days before starting the test and kept under food restriction for the whole duration of the test. The distress during the testing session is only a minimal part compared to the stress lived outside of the testing session, which is prolonged and continuous. Analogously, liquid rewards commonly rely on a previous water restriction protocol to use thirst as motivation. Animal stress is not only an ethical issue per se, but also an important factor potentially impacting on the reliability and reproducibility of experimental results.