Journal of Bionic Engineering

September 2019, Volume 16, Issue 5, pp 931–942| Cite as

Amirmasoud Ahmadi,Mahsa Behroozi,Vahid Shalchyan,Mohammad Reza Daliri

Neuroscience & Neuroengineering Research Lab., Biomedical Engineering Department, School of Electrical Engineering,Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST),Narmak, Tehran,Iran

Abstract

One of the most important topics in neuroscience is the issue of brain electrical stimulation and its widespread use. Based on this issue, rat robot, a rat navigation system was introduced in 2002, which has utilized brain electric stimulations as a guide and a reward for driving rats. Recently systems have been designed which are automatically navigated by a computer. One of the obstacles in the way of these systems is to select the stimulation frequency of the somatosensory cortex for the rotation action. In this paper, the stimulation parameters of the somatosensory cortex for rotation in the T-shaped maze were examined for the first time with applying only one pulse train. Then, the optimized parameters have been utilized in a complex maze. The results show that the performance is directly related to the pulse width and it has an inverse relationship with the pulse intervals. With optimal parameters, correctly controlling the animal in 90% of the trials in the T-maze, were managed, and in the complex maze, about 70% of the stimuli with optimized parameters were with only applying one pulse train. The results show that the stimulation parameters for navigation with only one pulse train are well optimized, and the results of this paper can be a trigger for an automatic navigation and reduce the computational costs and automatic system errors.

Keywords

rat robot bionic robot brain computer interface electrical stimulation somatosensory cortex 

Full text is available at :

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42235-019-0107-3