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About

Brent Utter is a researcher at the intersection of robotics, ethology, and bio-inspired design, whose work explores how robotic surrogates can be used to study and influence animal behavior. His primary research areas include animal-robot interaction, bio-inspired robotics, and the development of open-source platforms for behavioral experiments. Utter’s most notable contribution is the design and validation of an open-source five degree of freedom motion platform for investigating fish-robot interaction, a paper that has garnered 10 citations and provides a flexible tool for manipulating robotic lures in three-dimensional space. He further advanced this field by demonstrating that archerfish respond to a hunting robotic conspecific (7 citations), offering new insights into social behavior and predator-prey dynamics. Utter also developed a framework for identifying and simulating worst-case animal-vehicle interactions (5 citations), a critical tool for improving collision avoidance systems in intelligent vehicles. His work on ethorobotic fish (2 citations) underscores the importance of tail actuation strategies in designing effective robotic surrogates. By combining open-source engineering with rigorous behavioral testing, Utter is pioneering methods that allow researchers to control and replicate animal interactions in ways previously impossible with live subjects.