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Neophobia, aversive behaviour towards novel objects, foods and environments, is a trait that affects the ability of animals to adapt to new environments and exploit novel resources. Our previous work demonstrated that individual responses of house sparrows (Passer domesticus) to object neophobia trials were not correlated with time spent in or latency to enter a novel environment. However, because no positive stimulus was present in the novel environment, this study may have measured spatialneophilia. In the present study, we placed familiar food dishes in a novel environment and assessed whether an individual’s willingness to enter and feed was significantly correlated with its willingness to feed from a familiar dish containing a novel object in the home cage. We exposed house sparrows (n= 26) to a novel environment and measured their latency to enter and feed, total time spent in the novel environment and total feeding time. Sparrows were also assessed for object neophobia in their home cage. Results indicated that there were no correlations between any of the measured behaviours in the novel environment and individual responses to novel object trials, suggesting that even with food as a common motivator, spatial neophobia and object neophobia represent two distinct traits.
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This content will become publicly available on December 24, 2026
Kiri-Spoon: A kirigami utensil for robot-assisted feeding
For millions of adults with mobility limitations, eating meals is a daily challenge. A variety of robotic systems have been developed to address this societal need. These robots serve as a proxy for the human’s arm: the user inputs the food they want to eat, and the robot autonomously picks up that food and brings it to the user’s mouth. Unfortunately, end-user adoption of robot-assisted feeding is limited, in part because existing devices are unable to seamlessly grasp, manipulate, and feed diverse foods. Recent works seek to address this issue by creating newalgorithmsfor food acquisition and bite transfer. In parallel to these algorithmic developments, however, we hypothesize thatmechanical intelligencewill make it fundamentally easier for robot arms to feed humans. We therefore propose Kiri-Spoon, a soft utensil specifically designed for robot-assisted feeding. Kiri-Spoon consists of a spoon-shaped kirigami structure: when actuated, the kirigami sheet deforms into a bowl of increasing curvature. Robot arms equipped with Kiri-Spoon can leverage the kirigami structure to wrap-around morsels during acquisition, contain those items as the robot moves, and then compliantly release the food into the user’s mouth. Overall, Kiri-Spoon combines the familiar and comfortable shape of a standard spoon with the increased capabilities of soft robotic grippers. In what follows, we first apply a stakeholder-driven design process to ensure that Kiri-Spoon meets the needs of caregivers and users with physical disabilities. We next characterize the dynamics of Kiri-Spoon, and derive a mechanics model to relate actuation force to the spoon’s shape. The paper concludes with three separate experiments that evaluate (a) the mechanical advantage provided by Kiri-Spoon, (b) the ways users with disabilities perceive our system, and (c) how the mechanical intelligence of Kiri-Spoon complements state-of-the-art algorithms. Our results suggest that Kiri-Spoon advances robot-assisted feeding across diverse foods, multiple robotic platforms, and different manipulation algorithms.
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- PAR ID:
- 10690340
- Publisher / Repository:
- IJRR, Sage Publishers
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The International Journal of Robotics Research
- ISSN:
- 0278-3649
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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