Motion evaluation of a modified multi-link robotic rat

Abstract

The interaction test between a robotic rat and living rat is considered as a possible way to quantitatively characterize the rat sociality. In such robot-rat interactions, the robot should be designed to fully replicate a real rat in terms of morphological and behavioral characteristics. To address this problem, a multi-jointed robot prototype has been modified based on our previous work. We optimally update the forelimb of the robot and redesign the control board to make it more dexterous and increase its behavioral capability. Then, we systematically and kinematically analyze the rotational range of joint variables and the workspace of the robot by using traversal method. To evaluate the motion capability of the modified robot, we propose two quantitative parameters: maximum reachable height (MRH) and minimum bendable distance (MBD). Additionally, we achieve to quantitatively evaluate the behavioral similarity between the robot and rat with the calculated accumulative distance (AD) by using dynamic time warping (DTW). These evaluated methods show high promise to improve the robot-rat interaction to be more similar to rat-rat interaction.