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Animal–Robot Interaction experiments have demonstrated their usefulness to understand the social behaviour of a growing number of animal species. In order to study the mechanisms of social influences (from parents and peers) on behavioural development, we design an experimental setup where young quail chicks, after hatching, continuously live with autonomous mobile robots in mixed triadic groups of two chicks and one robot. As precocial birds are subject to imprinting, we compare groups where chicks meet the robot as their very first social partner, on their first day after hatching (R chicks), with groups where chicks meet a real conspecific first (C chicks), and the robot later (on the second day after hatching). We measured the behavioural synchronization between chicks and robot over three days. Afterwards, we directly tested the existence of a possible social bond between animal and robot, by performing …