Development of autonomous robotics technology for the study of rat pups

Abstract

We describe technology and tools being created for a series of biorobotics studies of Norway rat pups. These studies aim to inform both animal behavior and autonomous robotics. For biology, the crucial idea is that by simulating animal behavior by instantiating actual sensorimotor rules, the specifics for how this behavior was achieved represents a new neurobehavioral/neuroethological theory on how the biological system itself achieves its behavior. For robotics, studying infant mammals enables the study of development of sensorimotor rules from the simple to the complex. Our studies are unique in that animal, simulation, and robot studies occur in parallel and inform each other. Our initial goal is to develop scientific methods to approach the problem and robotics technology that can instantiate the methods. Towards that goal, we describe our dynamic simulation models, our robotic rat pups, our robot tracking algorithms, and our data analysis techniques.