A Soft Robotic Interface for Chick-Robot Affective Interactions
This work addresses the problem of designing safe and effective animal-robot interactions for animal welfare and neuroscience, but it is incremental as it builds on existing affective interface concepts.
The researchers tackled the challenge of making robotic agents acceptable to animals for welfare applications by developing a soft robotic interface with warmth, breathing-like motion, and face-like visual cues for newly hatched chicks, finding that chicks showed increasing acceptance with strong preferences for warmth and visual stimuli, though breathing cues had no effect.
The potential of Animal-Robot Interaction (ARI) in welfare applications depends on how much an animal perceives a robotic agent as socially relevant, non-threatening and potentially attractive (acceptance). Here, we present an animal-centered soft robotic affective interface for newly hatched chicks (Gallus gallus). The soft interface provides safe and controllable cues, including warmth, breathing-like rhythmic deformation, and face-like visual stimuli. We evaluated chick acceptance of the interface and chick-robot interactions by measuring spontaneous approach and touch responses during video tracking. Overall, chicks approached and spent increasing time on or near the interface, demonstrating acceptance of the device. Across different layouts, chicks showed strong preference for warm thermal stimulation, which increased over time. Face-like visual cues elicited a swift and stable preference, speeding up the initial approach to the tactile interface. Although the breathing cue did not elicit any preference, neither did it trigger avoidance, paving the way for further exploration. These findings translate affective interface concepts to ARI, demonstrating that appropriate soft, thermal and visual stimuli can sustain early chick-robot interactions. This work establishes a reliable evaluation protocol and a safe baseline for designing multimodal robotic devices for animal welfare and neuroscientific research.