Automatic motion tracking and data analysis system for a rat

The behavior analysis of animal has a key role in biology and robotics. In this paper, we choose the rat as analysis object. For understanding and grasping the behavior of rat, we set up an automatic motion tracking and data analysis system for a rat. This system includes three subsystems: inertial data acquisition, image tracking and real-time data analysis. The inertial subsystem uses one CC2530 development board and one small modular development board which integrates MPU6050 and electrical stimulator, and the inertial data collected by MPU6050 and the controls parameter sent by experimenter communicate by Zig-Bee wireless transmission module to realize the two-way transmission. The image tracking subsystem recognizes and tracks the rat by the camera. Besides, the inertial data and image tracking are time-synchronized. Finally, we program a data analysis interface by Matlab to conduct real-time data analysis. According to the tests, the automatic motion tracking and data analysis system can recognize the rat with a successful rate of 97%, combined with the inertial data. At the same time, we can conduct the real-time data analysis to simulate the attitude of the rat in the interface.