Scientists use robots to allow fish and bees to 'talk'

A group of researchers enabled communication between fish in Switzerland and bees in Austria, using robots to mediate the "conversation." Through robotics, they were able not only to make two different species communicate for the first time in some way, but also to influence one another's actions, proving that nature works collaboratively.

Scientists from Swiss, Portuguese, Austrian, French and Croatian universities came together to develop the study, under the command of researcher Frank Bonnet, from the Robotic Systems laboratory at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne, Switzerland, to develop the communication in question.

The goal is to try to get some form of animal behavior control to facilitate some operations with the animals away from risky areas - such as inducing birds away from airports where many of them die.

To achieve this result, each group of animals received a device that emitted signals specific to their species. The bee robots vibrated, changed temperatures, and produced air movements. Fish's changed color, shape, and type of movement. The signals produced were transmitted from one robot to another, which translated the language for the other species to understand.

The result was that one species adopted the behavior of the other. "The species even began to adopt each other's characteristics. The bees became a bit more agitated and walked less together than normal and the fish began to congregate more than they normally would, " Bonnet said in a statement. press.

All this is even more surprising if we consider that the pets are more than 700 km apart. "The robots acted as negotiators or interpreters at an international conference. Through various exchanges of information, the two groups of animals gradually made a shared decision, " said another researcher, Professor Francesco Mondada.

The study takes a new step in decoding animal biological signals and could mean a huge advance in the ability to communicate between species - even for us humans to communicate with animals!

See the study images here:

https://youtu.be/g4xrN9jKEgE