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A goldfish has successfully driven a robotic car, claims new research from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, discovered as part of an experiment to explore animal behavior.

The researchers wanted to know whether animals’ innate navigational abilities are universal or are restricted to their home environments. Taking the premise to the extreme, they designed a set of wheels under a goldfish tank with a camera system to record and translate the fish’s movements into forward and back and side-to-side directions to the wheels. By doing so, they discovered that a goldfish’s navigational ability supersedes its watery environs.

Their findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Behavioural Brain Research. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166432821005994?via%3Dihub [sciencedirect.com]

The researchers tested whether the fish was really navigating by placing a clearly visible target on the wall opposite the tank. After a few days of training, the fish navigated to the target. Moreover, they were able to do so even if they were interrupted in the middle by hitting a wall, and they were not fooled by false targets placed by the researchers.

https://www.autonomousvehicleinternational.com/videos/israeli-researchers-train-fish-to-drive-robotic-car.html [autonomousvehicleinternational.com]

Link includes a video that is pretty convincing. The fish does at least as good of a job as the early qualifying attempts I saw for the first Grand Challenge Darpa competition.

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