Blending in with the Shoal: Robotic Fish Swarms for Investigating Strategies of Group Formation in Guppies

Robotic fish that dynamically interact with live fish shoals dramatically augment the toolset of behavioral biologists. We have developed a system of biomimetic fish for the investigation of collective behavior in Guppies and similarly small fish. This contribution presents full implementation details of the system and promising experimental results. Over long durations our robots are able to integrate themselves into shoals or recruit the group to exposed locations that are usually avoided. This system is the first open-source project for both software and hardware components and is supposed to facilitate research in the emerging field of bio-hybrid societies.