Use of non-reward based electrical stimuli of the ventral posteromedial thalamic nucleus to control the turning behavior of rat motor navigation

The current state of development regarding rat-robots suffers from its dependency on reward-based directional control. To overcome this challenge, we proposed a Ventral Posteromedial(VPM) thalamic nucleus electrical stimulation based turning control method in this paper. With appropriate electrical stimulation parameters, the rat-robots showed ipsilateral turning behavior with controllable turning angle. This new head direction control method allowed the rat-robots to finish complex navigation tasks right after they recovered from surgery without any training process. Although the mechanism of this turning control method is still unclear, this new method possesses good prospects of application in the animal-robot field.