The robots will see you now


For more than a decade, biomimetic robots have been deployed alongside live animals to better understand the drivers of animal behavior, including social cues, fear, leadership, and even courtship. The encounters have always been unidirectional. … But in the lab of Maurizio Porfiri, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, the robots can now watch back. Porfiri and a team of collaborators tapped advances in real-time tracking software and robotics to design and test the first closed-loop control system featuring a bioinspired robotic replica interacting in three dimensions with live zebrafish. 

 

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