The Research Of Rat-robot Turning Behavior Control Based On Thalamic Electrical Stimulation

Animal robot system is a system that employ living animal and manipulate their behaviors by electrical stimulation on specific regions of animal’s brain through Brain-Computer-Interface (BCI) techniques. How to realize the precise control of the motion behavior of bio-robots is a basic problem and hot spot in the study of bio-robots. In the previous report, the establishment of a "tip-behavior response-reward" mode for the contorl of the turning behavior cost a lot of training time, which limited the development of rat robot system. Non-reward training based turning behavior control method research thus laid a foundation to animal robot with precisely controlled motion behavior and put forward a new research idea for the development of bio-robots.In this research work, we proposed a novel navigational control method for a rat-robot, through the stimulation of the VPM Ihalamic nucleus region. The influence of different VPM electrical stimualtion parameters on the turning behavior of the rat-robot were also comprehensively evaluated in this research work. And the turning bahivor of the rat-robot with the new VPM stimulaiton method was compared with the old barrier cortex stimulation method. The concrete content includes:(1) The analysis of rat’s own sensory information pathway. Finding new regions in brain for electrical stimulation and studying the relationship between the turning degree induced by thalamic electrical stimulation and electrical stimulation parameters.(2) The application of thalamic electrical stimulation based turning behavior control method to instead of the original reward training based turning behavior control method. Through the navigation task in a complicated environment, the overall characteristics of the new type of rat robot were tested.(3) Compared the performance of the ratrobot based on thalamic electrical stimulation method with the ratrobot based on sensory cortex stimulation method, and illustrated the possible difference biological mechanisms between these two rat-robot system.The turning behavior control method based on Ventral posteromedial thalamic nucleus electrical stimulation put forward a new research hot-point for bio-robots development. This new method greatly reduced the training work and save a lot of manpower and material resources. In addition, this new type rat robot system also provided a new research platform for the automatic navigation research of rat robot and intelligent fusion.