Animal Robot Prototypes Guided by Telestimulation System

A telestimulation system is described that enables an experimenter to train animal robots remotely. The system consists of three separate components: a transmitter base station that is controlled by a PC operator, a multi-channel remote-controlled stimulator backed by animal, and a computer vision based animal motion-analysis system. This system enables multichannel brain and body stimulation experiments in freely moving animals, and training experiments have done to rats, rabbits and dogs, which shows that the telestimulation system works accurately even under interference condition. Rat-robots and rabbit-robots have been trained successfully with our new animal robot training method, which integrates both sound cue and electrical stimulation. A beagle is training now to be a dog-robot, and more animal robot prototypes will come into being soon.