Researchers from Belgium, France and Switzerland have published an interesting little study in a recent number of Science. They developed some small autonomous robots and used them in a simple experiment with cockroaches. The robots and the cockroaches were placed together in a circular arena with two small dark shelters. Since cockroaches are night active, they prefer to stay in the shelters. The individual cockroach is influenced in its choice of shelter by the choices of the other cockroaches in such a way that usually all cockroaches ends up clustering together in the same shelter.

The robots were developed to be able to detect the cockroaches (and fellow robots) and to detect the dark shelter as well as moving autonomous in the arena. When they robots were given the same chemical signature as the real cockroaches, the researchers could show that the robots had the same importance for choice of shelter as the cockroaches.

This research is one of the first examples of artificial life-forms being able to participate in a group on equal footing with the biological individuals. Such a procedure applied to different animal societies may in the future teach us a lot more about how individuals interact in social animals and may, furthermore, be used to guide and control the behaviour of the group.

Source
J. Halloy, G. Sempo, G. Caprari, C. Rivault, M. Asadpour, F. Tâche, I. Saïd, V. Durier, S. Canonge, J. M. Amé, C. Detrain, N. Correll, A. Martinoli, F. Mondada, R. Siegwart, J. L. Deneubourg (2007) Social Integration of Robots into Groups of Cockroaches to Control Self-Organized Choices. Science 318: 1155-1158.