The team behind the experiment wanted to find out if fish might be capable of navigating a nonaquatic environment. So they set up a fish tank on motorized wheels and attached a camera and lidar sensor above the tank. When the fish swam toward the outer wall of the tank, the vehicle would move across the floor accordingly.
Can goldfish learn to drive vehicles?
Answer: Apparently so.
Shutterstock/ikhyon Kwon
If an Uber ride is piloted by a goldfish at some point in the future, don’t panic — the fish probably knows what it’s doing. Scientists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel have found that one of America’s favorite pets is capable of learning how to drive.
The team behind the experiment wanted to find out if fish might be capable of navigating a nonaquatic environment. So they set up a fish tank on motorized wheels and attached a camera and lidar sensor above the tank. When the fish swam toward the outer wall of the tank, the vehicle would move across the floor accordingly.
The team found that the fish could be trained to move the vehicle from a designated starting point to a targeted endpoint, marked by a pink target. When they tried to make it more complicated by moving the starting point or adding differently colored targets, the fish learned to avoid those obstacles. “This study suggests that fish can learn to control a vehicle and use simple navigation strategies to successfully perform a task,” the team concluded.
The team behind the experiment wanted to find out if fish might be capable of navigating a nonaquatic environment. So they set up a fish tank on motorized wheels and attached a camera and lidar sensor above the tank. When the fish swam toward the outer wall of the tank, the vehicle would move across the floor accordingly.
