A robot rat on wheels has learned how to interact with real rats while mimicking the rodents’ play and fighting behaviors.
“(The) robotic rats look and move like animals, and they smell the same,” he says. Qing Shi at the Beijing Institute of Technology, China. “It has become an important tool for studying the behavioral responses of individual or collective rats.”
The robotic rat developed by Shi and his colleagues has two front arms, one…