Reger B D, Fleming K M, Sanguineti V, Alford S, Mussa-Ivaldi F A
Department of Physiology, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, IL 60611, USA.
Artif Life. 2000 Fall;6(4):307-24. doi: 10.1162/106454600300103656.
We have created a hybrid neuro-robotic system that establishes two-way communication between the brain of a lamprey and a small mobile robot. The purpose of this system is to offer a new paradigm for investigating the behavioral, computational, and neurobiological mechanisms of sensory-motor learning in a unified context. The mobile robot acts as an artificial body that delivers sensory information to the neural tissue and receives command signals from it. The sensory information encodes the intensity of light generated by a fixed source. The closed-loop interaction between brain and robot generates autonomous behaviors whose features are strictly related to the structure and operation of the neural preparation. We provide a detailed description of the hybrid system, and we present experimental findings on its performance. In particular, we found (a) that the hybrid system generates stable behaviors, (b) that different preparations display different but systematic responses to the presentation of an optical stimulus, and (c) that alteration of the sensory input leads to short- and long-term adaptive changes in the robot responses. The comparison of the behaviors generated by the lamprey's brain stem with the behaviors generated by network models of the same neural system provides us with a new tool for investigating the computational properties of synaptic plasticity.
我们创建了一个混合神经机器人系统，该系统在七鳃鳗的大脑与一个小型移动机器人之间建立双向通信。该系统的目的是提供一种新的范式，以便在统一的背景下研究感觉运动学习的行为、计算和神经生物学机制。移动机器人充当一个人造身体，将感觉信息传递给神经组织并从其接收命令信号。感觉信息对由固定光源产生的光的强度进行编码。大脑与机器人之间的闭环交互产生自主行为，其特征与神经制剂的结构和操作密切相关。我们对混合系统进行了详细描述，并展示了其性能的实验结果。特别是，我们发现：（a）混合系统产生稳定的行为；（b）不同的制剂对光刺激的呈现表现出不同但系统的反应；（c）感觉输入的改变会导致机器人反应出现短期和长期的适应性变化。将七鳃鳗脑干产生的行为与同一神经系统的网络模型产生的行为进行比较，为我们提供了一种研究突触可塑性计算特性的新工具。
