Behavioural Trajectories of Adaptive Mobile Robot for Animal Behaviour Studies

Modelling animal behaviour using adaptive mobile robots is a well stabilised methodology that permits to test, in an extremely controlled setting, hypnotises, constrains and assumptions about how organisms orient themselves. We apply this methodology to simulate experiments with rats in open field box. Animal psychologists have used open field box settings in order to empirically show the formal structure of cognitive maps used by rats in navigation tasks. In these experiments, rats that have been shown the location of hidden food in a rectangular box are able to navigate towards and dig at that location (or at the rotational equivalent location) in a second identical box. These results lead researchers to state that (a) rats use a cognitive map of the environmental shape, and (b) the cognitive maps can be described in terms of Euclidean geometry. We studied an adaptive mobile robot in a similar experimental setting. Our robot had no capability of constructing internal maps. The robot, despite its sensory-motor limitations, learnt the same behavioural indexes as rats in the open field box experiments. The results show that the open field box experiments are not sufficient to conclude that the rats construct cognitive maps. Other task solutions based on no explicit knowledge of the environment are theoretically possible. The results show that the geometrical properties of the environment can be assimilated in the sensory-motor schema of the robot behaviour without any explicit representation.