Abstract
Maternal care has a positive impact on chick welfare but practical and economic reasons prevent commercial farms from raising chicks with their mother hen. Building robotic hens that interact with the chicks is an appealing solution. Moreover, robotic companions are valuable tools for investigating the development of social behaviour, with important implications for biomedical research. In this project, we will build robotic companions for chicks to identify the behaviours that enhance chick welfare and productivity. This multidisciplinary project combines the expertise in animal cognition (Department of Psychology) and robotics (EECS, ARQ) at QMUL with that in animal welfare at RVC.
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