Assessing the Significance of Tail Actuation Strategy in Ethorobotic Fish

Abstract

In studies of animal social behavior, an inability to control live animals can limit what behaviors can be manipulated in any given experiment. To offer more possibilities in experimental design, robotic surrogates may be used instead of live animals, but factors affecting social interaction between live and robotic animals remain largely unknown. In this study, two robotic fish approximating banded archerfish, Toxotes jaculatrix, were designed to investigate how caudal fin actuation strategy affects the way live archerfish interact with a robot. A series of trials provided measurements of distance from four archerfish to each robot. Using minimum distance from any fish to a datum at the mean position of the robot as a metric of proximity, preliminary results suggest that archerfish do not prefer either actuation strategy, which suggests that robots intended to interact with live fish may be designed using either strategy with similar results.