Application of a Fractional Factorial Design to Model the Attractiveness of a Robotic Fish to a Shoal of Zebrafish

Abstract

To design the appropriate robotic system used during mixed society experiments, a stimuli analysis was preliminary required to test which aspects of the robotic devices could trigger the social behavior of the zebrafish. The main difficulty with such stimuli analysis is to isolate the effect of the different stimuli that the robot generates and that could induce a social behavior on the fish. In order to study the acceptance of the robot towards zebrafish, we varied several parameters of the system and used design of experiments methods to reduce the number of performed experiments and determined the impact of each factor on the acceptance of the robot towards a small group of zebrafish.