Development of novel experimental setup using rat and small mobile robot to study behavior synchronization of animals

Behavior synchronization of humans during conversation and cooperative task has been studied in psychology. In robotics, several researchers also have been studying cooperative task between a human and a robot referring to these studies. However, mechanisms of behavior synchronization are still unclear because of complexity of human being. Therefore, referring to animal psychology, we propose a novel experimental methodology to study behavior synchronization through interaction experiments between a rat and a robot. We then developed small mobile robots and an experimental setup. This experimental setup consists of two open-fields. A robot and a rat are released into each open-field. The robot reproduces motion of the rat in the other open-field. Using this experimental setup we also performed a preliminary experiment to investigate behavior synchronization. In this paper, we describe the robot and the experimental setup. We also introduce result of the experiment briefly.