How A.I. and multi-robot systems research will accelerate our understanding of social animal behavior

Our understanding of social insect behavior has significantly influenced A.I. and multi-robot systems’ research (e.g. ant algorithms and swarm robotics). In this work, however, we focus on the opposite question, namely: “how can multi-robot systems research contribute to the understanding of social animal behavior?.” As we show, we are able to contribute at several levels: First, using algorithms that originated in the robotics community, we can track animals under observation to provide essential quantitative data for animal behavior research. Second, by developing and applying algorithms originating in speech recognition and computer vision, we can automatically label the behavior of animals under observation. Our ultimate goal, however, is to automatically create, from observation, executable models of behavior. An executable model is a control program for an agent that can run in simulation (or on a robot). The representation for these executable models is drawn from research in multi-robot systems programming. In this paper we present the algorithms we have developed for tracking, recognizing, and learning models of social animal behavior, details of their implementation, and quantitative experimental results using them to study social insects.