While biorobotics has mostly been used to exploit the innate skills of living animals, in this case example, biorobots can also be used to model ecological situations, such as predator-prey relationships.
RoboSquirrel isn’t a complex robot. It mostly consists of two skills, first, moving from one end of a wooden box to the other, and second, to wag its tail. At first, it seems extremely useless; I mean, what does it even actually do? But after it is used on an actual rattlesnake, it become very clear what its function is.
From the video, we can clearly see that the rattlesnake does not strike when the squirrels tail moves, yet it does strike when the squirrels tail does not. Concepts such as these, which used to only be made through careful observation, can now rely on robots to model them effectively. And we find that the biorobot is actually effective when we take a look at an actual squirrels behavior.
It’s about three minutes long, and the first and last thirty seconds should give you what you want to know.
In this video, we see that for three minutes, a rattlesnake approaches a squirrel, but does not even think to strike, as the squirrel’s tail wags the entire time. While before the creation of the RoboSquirrel, this idea could only be theorized, the RoboSquirrel proves that it is innate and constant in its effect.
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