Researchers are looking for unique human or animal abilities that can be copied, turned into software, and replicated in order to make robots work better, according to a report by Discovery News.

Studies are being conducted as part of an emerging field known as "neurobiological robotics."

Researchers from all over the world will be presenting a number of "works-in-progress" during the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation this week in Hong Kong.

"We're trying to make the robot brain more like human brain," said Jeff Krichmar, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, according to Discovery News. "The brain has incredibly flexibility and adaptability. If you look at any artificial system, it's far more brittle than biology."

One of the goals Krichmar has is to make neurotic robots who display signs of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). In order to achieve this goal, he has to make a robot act like a mouse in a cage.

"If you put a rodent in a room that is open and unfamiliar, it will hug the walls," Krichmar said. "It will hide until it becomes comfortable, then it will move across the room. It will wait until if feels comfortable. We did that with a robot and made it so it was so anxious it would never cross the room."

Krichmar and his colleagues uses a rodent model and varying levels of dopamine and serotonin, the two brain hormones that run pleasure centers and well-being.

The effects of the hormones on the rodent are then duplicated in the robot's software, according to Discovery News.

"We're mimicking the action of the chemicals with equations," he said. "We are doing mathematical models of brain or cognitive system, then putting that in software and it becomes the controller for the robot."

Other teams are presenting unique takes on robot development as well, like teaching a robot how to learn like a baby from the University of Plymouth (UK).

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