Robots enable bees and fish to talk to each other

Through an imaginative experiment, researchers were able to get two extremely different animal species located far apart to interact with each other and reach a shared decision with the help of robots. Bees and fish don't often have the occasion to meet, nor would they have much to say to each other if they did. However, under the ASSISIbf project, engineers from EPFL and four other European universities* were able to get groups of bees and fish to communicate with each other. The bees were located in Austria and the fish in Switzerland. Through robots, the two species transmitted signals back and forth to each other and gradually began coordinating their decisions. The study was published today in Science Robotics. "We created an unprecedented bridge between the two animal communities, enabling them to exchange some of their dynamics," says Frank Bonnet, a researcher at EPFL's Mobile Robots Group (MOBOTS), which is now part of the school's Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob).