LEURRE

LEURRE is a project on building and controlling mixed societies composed of animals and artificial agents sponsored by the European community. The LEURRE project showed for the first time that social interaction between animals and robots allows for creating non-natural behaviors in the animal society.

The main goals are:

*to study, experimentally and theoretically, the global behaviours of mixed-societies composed of animals and artificial agents;

*to develop models and tools for such mixed-societies;

*to provide a general methodology towards the control of mixed-societies;

*to validate the concepts by applying this methodology to the control of experiments in the laboratory and in agriculture.

Models and tools for mixed-societies

The LEURRE project involved interdisciplinary collaboration between engineers and biologists, and lead to the development of a suite of tools

* The Insbot, a robot that is able to integrate into a cockroach society when impregnated with cockroach pheromones
* The software package Swistrack, an open-source software that is able to analyse the trajectories of cockroaches and robots, and hence allow to analyse their individual behavior as well the spatio-temporal patterns appearing on collective level

External links

* [http://leurre.ulb.ac.be/] - Homepage of the LEURRE project