Robots creating new ecological linkage - A possible future method to repair damaged ecosystems
Humanity’s well-being depends on our earth’s ecosystems. Currently, many of these ecosystems are under pressure, as our human society induces climate change, depletes the oceans, poisons the waters and destroys valuable habitats. Two of the major stressed groups are fish and insects, facing a rapid decline recently.
The thinner ecosystems get, the more fragile they become, furthering their own decay. Thus “re-knotting” the ecological networks around us will be a crucial task for future generations. Ecological relationships are characterized by flow of substances between organismic populations as well as by their reciprocal affection via behavioural interaction, what can be seen as a flow of information between two populations.
Here we demonstrate, for the first time, that robots are capable of acting as communication carriers and as translators between two species, even if biological evolution did not equip them to communicate with each other. In the movie we show how two very distant populations of fish and honeybees, which are located hundreds of kilometers apart from each other in Europe, coordinate their collective decision making with the mediating help of fish robots and bee robots that are connected via the internet. Together, they find an agreement towards a coordinated collective behaviour.
In this example one single “bit” of information is exchanged between these two animal groups. While this is only a lab experiment, it is a proof of principle that robots can be used to affect and coordinate animal populations reciprocally. This way, a first step towards “rewiring” harmed ecosystems is made, waiting for future applications and extensions.
This work was done within the framework of the EU FET project ASSISIbf: • EU FET project ASSISIbf - Bees and fish co...
Article:
http://robotics.sciencemag.org/conten...
Project website:
http://zool33.uni-graz.at/artlife/ass...
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