Exploration into Animal-Robot Interactions: Purchasing a Mechanical Feline for a Rabbit's Companionhip Unearths Oddities in Research Field
For a brief period during a care robot research project in Sweden, a researcher invited "Paro the seal," a robotic seal, into their home. The seal was initially on loan from a roboticist colleague, but the research project's delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic meant that Paro indefinitely prolonged their stay.
Neighborhood children, intrigued by the novelty, showed only fleeting interest in the robot. The researcher's resident rabbit, Topsey, demonstrated indifference towards the robotic novelty, and the children's guesswork suggested that Topsey didn't miss the attention diverted towards the robot.
To gauge how other children might react, the researcher introduced Paro to a friend's 11-year-old daughter. Instructions were provided to pet the seal to trigger its sensors. While the older child tried to be polite and ask questions about the robot's functionality, her six-year-old brother lost interest almost immediately, sharing his apathy with their cat.
Approximately a year later, the research project acquired an "orange tabby cat robot" called Joy for All, produced by Ageless Innovation. The robot was designed to help individuals with dementia feel calmer, offer companionship, and provide opportunities for interactions. Initially intended for a pop-up exhibition on care robots at a local museum, the researcher utilized the cat to create a TikTok account named Robot_meets_pet.
Filming sessions allowed various pets to interact with the robot, starting with the researcher's rabbit. Despite limited interest from the rabbit, the cat proved to be an interactive success when edited footage was uploaded on TikTok. To expand the experiment, the researcher reached out to friends nearby with pets, capturing interactions with two rabbits, three cats, and two dogs.
Initially, the experiments aimed to gather data for the scientific study of care robots. However, the roboticist found similarities in Anthropomorphic Research (ARI) literature regarding animal-robot interaction, particularly focusing on intelligibility. In order for these interactions to work effectively, robots must interpret an animal's thoughts, feelings, and actions while the animal must comprehend cues presented by the robot.
Interestingly, both children and most adults losing interest in Paro and this cat robot led the researcher to question whether pets recognized the robots as animals. After conducting sessions where pets displayed minimal interaction with the robots, leading to a few seconds of clips edited for TikTok purposes, the researcher turned to ARI literature for answers.
Research in the field of Animal-Robot Interaction (ARI) emphasized the importance of intelligibility in animal-robot interactions, mirroring Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) literature. Robots must read and react to animals' thoughts, feelings, and actions, while animals must decipher the cues presented by robots. This isn't to say the animals believe robots are animals, but rather that cues from both parties must be comprehensible.
Robotic imaginaries, or the ideas surrounding what robots can be and do, are also present in ARI. One study constructed robot cockroaches, allowing the mechanized agents to influence social decisions among insect groups. The concept of manipulating cockroaches on behalf of humans is unsettling to the researcher.
Another study experimented with implanting robotic devices in large animal groups to direct behavior through environmental modifications. Research into regulating and directing bee behavior through vibrations and heat adjustments was particularly relevant as it showed that robots contained vibration mechanisms similar to Paro and the cat robot.
The researcher additionally found work utilizing movement cues from robots to influence fish schooling patterns, observing domestic chickens' behavior, and training rats to follow robotic counterparts. The goal in these experiments is to achieve successful integration, or "bioacceptance."
While many potential scenarios using animal-robot relationships remain years away, the researcher considers both military and agricultural uses, such as controlling animals in security contexts, improving industrial livestock practices, and monitoring endangered species.
In the field of ARI, robots are being used for animal behavior studies, thus providing opportunities to control elements of these relationships—either in the traditional sense of a controlled variable or by actually controlling the animal itself. Cyborg versions of animals, incorporating electronic devices into their nervous systems, muscles, or antennae, are also being researched.
For example, researchers have designed a robotic system that translates human speech commands into electrical signals to control the movements of a rat brain. Similar experiments with fish have yielded promising results. The potential military applications of these cyborgs, although controversial, are apparent in some of the research involving cockroaches, beetles, lizards, rats, pigeons, and more.
Robots are often used to communicate with or send signals to animals in various settings. A reflection of the researcher is that these mediated interactions may trigger emotions, such as unease, in observing experimentation on larger groups of animals, like fish and birds, or projects involving manipulation of animal behavior, particularly with domesticated animals like dogs.
Despite high expectations, the TikTok videos generated limited emotional responses from viewers. Out of hundreds of views and double-taps, only six comments were posted, with little substantive conversation about the nature of the robot-pet interaction. Additionally, reading about such projects provoked a sense of unease, discomfort, and even repulsion towards the idea of dogs interacting with robots.
Professor Ericka Johnson, from Linköping University in Sweden, authored a book discussing the emotional responses to robots. These feelings were found to be relevant within the field of ARI, particularly in experiments involving dogs. Johnson questions whether the use of robots as companions for aging humans, like elderly mothers, would raise similar ethical and emotional concerns.
- The researcher's exploration of animal-robot interaction, as seen in the TikTok account Robot_meets_pet, raises questions about whether pets recognize robots as animals, just as it does among humans.
- The field of Animal-Robot Interaction (ARI) highlights the importance of intelligibility in animal-robot interactions, mirroring Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) literature, a factor that could influence how pets perceive and interact with robots.
