NRI scientist has rats dancing to robot tune

The ‘ratbot’, as it is being called, can be put to use in search and rescue operations and in areas where the risk to human life is high, says Talwar.

In fact, Talwar told The Indian Express that in part, the concept grew out of the January 26 Gujarat earthquake and the September 11 attacks on the United States. The massive loss of life accompanying such destruction could be considerably reduced if adequate search and rescue operations were mounted, and it’s here that ‘ratbots’, rather than humans, could more successfully navigate the difficult terrain, he added.

A graduate of Mumbai’s St Xavier’s College, Talwar is now at the State University of New York. His research team implanted probes into areas of the rat brain which are responsible for sensing reward and which process signals from their whiskers.

Wires from the probes ran into an electronic backpack carried by each rat, which contained a microprocessor-based remote-controlled stimulator.

Using the implanted probes, the researchers trained rats to interpret the remote commands in a maze.

By stimulating the whisker centres, they steered the rats further by stimulating the brain’s reward centre. After some hard training, the rats could be made to turn, run, jump and climb through an unconfined three-dimensional environment following commands issued from a laptop computer.

Though it is contrary to the rats’ instinctive behavior, they could also be made to move around in a brightly lit open area once they were modified to become ‘ratbots’.

The researchers hope to eventually produce ‘robotic’ rats that can be put to work in any environment.

‘‘The findings will have future application in developing brain-machine interfaces to help paralysed patients to control artificial limbs by thought and to experience sensations such as touch directly by brain stimulation,’’ Talwar says.

Another potential application: using guided animals like rats or even birds in defense and anti-terrorist operations. Such creatures could perform guided surveillance if they’re equipped by standard electronics — e.g. small video cameras, global positioning systems and microphones, says Talwar.