Robots mediating interactions between animals for interspecies collective behaviors

Self-organized collective behavior has been analyzed in diverse types of gregarious animals. Such collective intelligence emerges from the synergy between individuals, which behave at their own time and spatial scales and without global rules. Recently robots have been developed to collaborate with animal groups in the pursuit of better understanding their decision-making processes. These bio-hybrid systems make cooperative relationships between artificial systems and animals possible, which can yield new capabilities in the resulting mixed group. However, robots are currently tailor-made to successfully engage with one animal species at a time. This limits the possibilities to introduce distinct species-dependent perceptual capabilities and types of behaviors in the same system. Here we show that robots socially integrated into animal groups of honeybees and zebrafish, each one located in a different city, allow these two species to interact. This interspecific information transfer is demonstrated by collective decisions that emerge between the two autonomous robotic systems and the two animal groups. This novel bio-hybrid system works at any distance thanks to the robots and operates in water and air with multiple sensorimotor properties across species barriers and ecosystems. These results demonstrate the feasibility of generating and controlling behavioral patterns in bio-hybrid groups of multiple species. Such interspecies connections between diverse robotic systems and animal species open the door for new forms of artificial collective intelligence, where the unrivalled perceptual capabilities of the animals and their brains can be used to enhance autonomous decision-making, which could find applications in selective "rewiring" of ecosystems.