An AI-powered robotic rat has made friends with a real rodent in a scientific breakthrough.
The life-size robotic rat has wheels instead of legs and does not have a tail, but it does have a plastic snout, small forelimbs and the ability to scurry around and mimic rat-like postures.
Chinese researchers created an "autonomous, interactive rat-like robot" that was fitted with a camera, a small motor and several joints to allow it to replicate the subtleties of rat body language.
It was trained on footage of real rats interacting and was also able to react in real-time to social cues from a rodent.
The scientists say their machine, dubbed Smuro, was able to "capture the attention of rats and significantly arouse their interest" and could do this non-stop for half an hour.
An AI-powered computer allows the robo-rat to see what a real rodent does, imitate it, and behave in a natural way all in real time.
Testing showed that the rat behaved with the robot in the same way as it would do with a real rat.
Guanglu Jia et al, Nature Machine Intelligence (2024)
For example, when the machine expressed anger the rat cowered and whined, but it also nestled and was playful when the machine conveyed a more amenable demeanour.
Sci-fi films have often shown a world where humans are so besotted with ultra-lifelike robots that they forget the androids are not real, with the lines between people and machines becoming blurred.
Some have sped up the possibility of these life-like machines becoming closer to reality, with Elon Musk announcing recently that his bipedal "Optimus" robot will be "your own personal RD2, C-3PO", for less than the cost of a car in the future and predicts the human-like machines will be able to mow the lawn, serve drinks and babysit children.
The Chinese scientists showed that the barrier between living beings and machines can be breached in rats, and say this "may open the door" for similar social interactions between humans and AI in the future.
Professor Thomas Schmickl, an expert in bio-hybrid systems at the University of Graz, Austria, who was not involved with the study, said the robo-rat has "unprecedented social skills".
Guanglu Jia et al, Nature Machine Intelligence (2024)
"Smuro engages in active 'animal-robot interaction', showing unprecedented social learning skills in a biomimetic robot engaging in long-lasting behavioural dialogues with living rats," he wrote in an accompanying commentary alongside the paper.
He added: "The authors' pioneering study demonstrates the robot's ability to successfully track the rat and learn three major socially relevant postures: pinning, pouncing and social nose contact.
"One remarkable finding is that Smuro can successfully actively alter the rat's emotional state.
"This study is the first that achieved social learning, as it is based on observation and imitation and clearly the robot and the rats alter their behaviours in consequence to their interaction.
"It will be interesting to see where the door opened by Smuro will lead us. Future research should scale up from two agents to larger populations.
"Will we see robot-facilitated and robot-inclusive memetic, thus cultural, evolution in those mixed biohybrid rat-robot societies?"
The study is published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.