Can Robots Tutor Birds?

By Iva Fedorka

Young birds, like other animals, learn best by imitating adults. To further understand the benefits of first-hand observation in birds, researchers used robots to study and train them.

The study involved recording high-speed videos of singing adult zebra finch males to analyze their head, beak, and throat movements. Using 3D scanning, 3D printing, and color-realistic painting, the researchers created a device called the RoboFinch that could mimic the movements and behavior of real finches. The findings of this study were published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution in April 2023.

The Experiment

Researchers divided young zebra finches into four groups, all of which heard song recordings through a nearby speaker. One group only heard the recording, while another group was accompanied by non-singing live female birds. The remaining two groups were exposed to the robot birds, with one group having the robot’s movements synchronized with the singing and the other group seeing unsynchronized behavior.

The birds exposed to the robots showed a higher interest in them and the speaker, regardless of whether they actually learned the songs. Ralph Simon, a bioacoustics researcher at the Nuremberg Zoo in Germany and a member of the RoboFinch team, stated that the young birds immediately became interested in the robots and approached them within a few minutes of hearing the singing.

The chicks in the group with the synchronized robot sang less during the playback, indicating that they were listening to the recording. The birds paired with the non-singing females also sang less while hearing the songs.

During the first week of the study, the finch chicks exposed to the robot with synchronized beak movements spent 27 percent of their time near the robot, while those exposed to out-of-sync movements spent only 5 percent of their time nearby. The finches that only heard the recording, with or without female birds, spent less than 5 percent of their time near the speaker.

Can Robots Help?

The potential real-world applications of this research are significant.

These robots could help orphaned or endangered wild birds learn how to sing, as some young birds may not learn their species’ characteristic calls without role models. The decline of bird species worldwide, as reported by BirdLife International in 2018, and the loss of nearly 3 billion North American birds since 1970, according to a 2019 study in Science, highlight the importance of finding innovative solutions to address this issue.

The paper includes information about open-source software and assembly instructions, with the hope that other researchers will use these tools to study various aspects of birdsong learning, such as audio-visual cues, multisensory cues during song development, signal detection, recognition, learning, and memory.