Social learning is an evolutionarily important ability increasingly attributed also to invertebrate species. Interfacing robots with animals represents a promising strategy to investigate social learning. Herein, we studied if the gregarious form of Locusta migratoria, a particularly suited model to examine social learning, can use social information provided by robotic demonstrators to optimize their predator avoidance. Robotic demonstrators with different silhouettes and colours (biomimetic or neutral) were used to investigate if their rotation on a rod (e.g. hiding behaviour) elicited the same behaviour in neighbouring locusts. Locusts’ responses were affected by different robotic demonstrators, observing a significant impact of the biomimetic silhouette in reducing the latency duration, and in promoting social learning (e.g. locusts displaying hiding behaviour after observing it in robotic demonstrators). A significant impact of colour patterns in triggering socially induced hiding behaviour was also recorded, especially when the biomimetic silhouette was coloured with the gregarious-like pattern. This research indicates gregarious locusts exploit social information in specific ecological contexts, providing basic knowledge on the complex behavioural ecology and social biology in invertebrates. The proposed animal-robot interaction paradigm shows the role of robots as carrier of social information to living organisms, suggesting social biorobotics as advanced and sustainable approach for socio-biology investigation, and environmental management.

社会学习是一种进化上重要的能力，越来越多地归因于无脊椎动物。将机器人与动物连接代表了研究社会学习的一种有前途的策略。在此，我们研究了飞蝗的群居形式（一种特别适合检查社会学习的模型）是否可以使用机器人演示者提供的社会信息来优化其捕食者躲避。使用具有不同轮廓和颜色（仿生或中性）的机器人演示器来研究它们在杆上的旋转（例如隐藏行为）是否会在邻近的蝗虫中引起相同的行为。蝗虫的反应受到不同机器人演示者的影响，观察到仿生轮廓在减少潜伏期和促进社会学习方面的显着影响（例如，蝗虫在机器人演示者中观察到后表现出隐藏行为）。还记录了颜色图案对触发社会诱导的隐藏行为的显着影响，特别是当仿生轮廓涂有类群图案的颜色时。这项研究表明，群居蝗虫在特定的生态环境中利用社会信息，为无脊椎动物复杂的行为生态学和社会生物学提供了基础知识。所提出的动物-机器人交互范式展示了机器人作为生物体社会信息载体的作用，表明社会生物机器人学是社会生物学研究和环境管理的先进且可持续的方法。