A Study of the Rat's Turning Behaviors Based on Electrical Brain Stimulation

摘要

Animal-robots have unique advantages compared with conventional robots. Nevertheless, the mechanism of animal's brain for motor control is still unclear. Therefore, adult male Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats are chosen as the rat-robots to investigate the rat's turning behaviors based on electrical brain stimulation. In this paper, we control the turning movements of rat through stimulating the Somatosensory Barrel Field Cortex (S1BF) area of rat's brain. In order to find out the relationship between different parameters of electrical stimulation and rat's turning behaviors, we design an electrical stimulation system which is composed of hardware part and software part. Specifically, when stimulating the rat, we utilize the image processing method combining histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) and support vector machine (SVM) to analyze rat's turning behaviors. Finally, we find that the turning angle of rat approximately linearly increases with stimulation time, and exponentially increases with voltage amplitude. The respective R² value is 0.947, 0.954. While as the stimulation frequency increases, the turning angle increases first and then decreases.