Volume 14, Issue 2, April 2017, Pages 327–335

• Dae-Gun Kim^a, 
• Serin Lee^b, 
• Cheol-Hu Kim^a, 
• Sungho Jo^c, 
• Phill-Seung Lee^a, , 

• ^a Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), 373-1 Guseong-dong, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea
• ^b Institute for Infocomm Research, 1 Fusionopolis Way, #21-01 Connexis, Singapore
• ^c Department of Computer Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, (KAIST) 373-1 Guseong-dong, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea

• Abstract

  In research on small mobile robots and biomimetic robots, locomotion ability remains a major issue despite many advances in technology. However, evolution has led to there being many real animals capable of excellent locomotion. This paper presents a “parasitic robot system” whereby locomotion abilities of an animal are applied to a robot task. We chose a turtle as our first host animal and designed a parasitic robot that can perform “operant conditioning”. The parasitic robot, which is attached to the turtle, can induce object-tracking behavior of the turtle toward a Light Emitting Diode (LED) and positively reinforce the behavior through repeated stimulus-response interaction. After training sessions over five weeks, the robot could successfully control the direction of movement of the trained turtles in the waypoint navigation task. This hybrid animal-robot interaction system could provide an alternative solution to some of the limitations of conventional mobile robot systems in various fields, and could also act as a useful interaction system for the behavioral sciences.

  Keywords

  • parasitic robot; 
  • operant conditioning; 
  • waypoint navigation; 
  • red-eared slider; 
  • trachemys scripta elegans
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  • Full text is available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1672652917300136