Research On Controllable Immobile Behavior In Animal-robotics

Cyborg animal, also known as hybrid robot, is a being with both biological and artificial (e.g. electronic, mechanical or robotic) parts. Cyborg animal achieves the factitious control of movement of animals and certain other acts. Because of its advantages in motor function and power supply, cyborg animal can overcome the limitations of traditional robotics in flexibility, maneuverability, mobility and adaptability.Two strategies of artificial control of vertebrate locomotion by intracranial electrical stimulation have achieved great success in inducing specific movements. In the first strategy, a brain can be stimulated in proper regions to generate specific locomotor movements without training. The other strategy is based on operant conditioning paradigm. The locomotion of a trained rat can be remotely guided to carry out special tasks when utilizing direct electrical stimulation in the sensory cortex as conditioning stimuli and electrical stimulation in medial forebrain bundle(MFB)as the reinforcing stimulus.Most researchers focused on the initiation and maintain the movement of navigating cyborg animal previously, but termination of movement has the same importance in animal-robotics. As far as practical applications are concerned, braking is an important function for cyborg animal. In this paper, we design and implant the freezing function on the rat-robot via the defense reaction. The effect of the periaqueductal gray matter (PAG) stimulation parameters and environmental factors for the length of rat-robotic immobile behavior are studied. Based on the rat-robot navigation system developed by Qiushi Academy for Advanced Studies (QAAS), we succeeded in implementing the freezing function on the navigation rat-robot by combining both two strategies of artificial control.This study showed that, via the stable and reliable the neural interface, the conditional and unconditional stimuli could be directly transmitted to the specific cerebral cortex and nuclei to reduce the interference from the environmental factors and their own willingness. Establishing long-term, effective and stable stimulus-response model, the Cyborg animal had a great potential application in areas of military, human rehabilitation projects and etc.