Behavioural sciences have shown that animals' interactions could be rather simple signals and that it is possible to interact with animals not only by mimicking their whole behaviours but also by making specifically designed artefacts. The theory of self-organisation applied to animal societies shows that very simple, but numerous, interactions taking place between individuals may ensure complex performances at the level of the group and produce collective capacities. In this context, our aim is to develop mixed-societies composed of animals and robots that interact and communicate.
One of the main questions in social biology is to understand the link between individual and collective behaviour. Elegant ways to identify individual behavioural algorithms consist in replacing some animals within a group by robots and comparing collective responses in "mixed" and "natural" groups.
Breeding domestic animals, taking into account their welfare, and managing wild populations are other fields concerned with such mixed groups of robots and animals. Indeed, most of the species that we are breeding, hunting or fishing are social.
Many behavourial issues appearing in animal societies have a strong self-organised component: synchronisation of activities, aggregation, sorting, etc. As most self-organised systems are very sensitive to small quantitative changes at the individual level, it is possible that a limited number of robots interacting within the group might give the opportunity to the animals to escape from some sub-optimal solution by introducing new collective behaviours.
The control of the behaviour of domestic fowl and other birds of poultry farming gathered in very large numbers is one example. Social imitation plays a key role in these species and most of their collective behaviour results from positive feedback. For instance, collective panic movements, which may result from such positive feedback, induce high mortality in some species. A robot (or a group of robots) could be able to induce a new wanted behaviour or modify the organisation of the group in order to damp the snowball effect of collective panic.
Pests are often highly social species. In general, methods of management acting at the level of the social behaviour should be much more efficient than the usual destructive methods. One example of pest management refers to birds roosting by thousands in a given place that might be the source of various environmental problems especially for local inhabitants. In such context, a control of the roosting behaviour by using relatively simple robots would be able to affect the spatial distribution of these wild animals.
Robotics has much to learn from ethology while robotics may surely help ethology to explore animal behaviour. The main goals of this project is to show that complex collective responses may emerge from individual simplicity and simple signals and that experiments using lures mimicking these simple signals are able to modify the group behaviour. The state of the art of robotics is such that, today, we are able to design robots capable to interact with animals, create mixed groups of animals and robots, and develop a fundamental and applied scientific program in this field. The different problems to solve and the potential benefits that can be gained by mixed-societies are sufficiently important to initiate and develop research in this direction.