Advancing artificial animals
- by Alla Katsnelson
When Maurizio Porfiri set out a decade ago to build a robot that could control how a group of animals behaved, he envisioned using it in the wild to perform environmental functions such as steering fish away from danger. ...“As we were doing the experiments, we got interested in what’s going on in their heads,” says Porfiri, a mechanical engineer at New York University Tandon School of Engineering. “How do they perceive the mimicry of the robot? How do they respond to it? And, does their response depend on their personality?”
