The embodiment of cockroach behaviour in a micro-robot

Autonomous robots may some day be able to behave like an animal, be accepted by the animal as a conspecific and influence the individual as well as the collective behaviour of the animal and its conspecifics. With this objective in mind we report here the results of the first step in this direction, making the robot move like an animal. We programmed the Alice (sugar-cube) robot to behave qualitatively like a cockroach (random walk with wall-following behaviour). We then analyzed Alice displacement with the same standard techniques that were used for the cockroach studies (implemented in the free software R) and compared it to the underlying cockroach behvaviours: most were correctly reproduced both qualitatively and quantitatively. We finish by discussing how congregative behaviour will be implemented and mention potential applications of such an insbot (insect-like robot).