Robotic Rat Phantom for Assessment of Rodent-Sized Exoskeletons in Neurorehabilitation Studies

抄録

A major obstacle to performing comparative experiments with robotic exoskeletons is the difficulty of conducting human research including clinical ethics. Therefore, investigative research tools are needed such as exoskeletons for animals including rodents. In this paper, we propose a robotic rat phantom as a dynamic testing tool for robotic exoskeletons for rodents. We present the developed phantom and preliminary experiments on our previously developed exoskeleton. The result showed that the phantom is capable of imposing perturbations at the desired timing, and helped us estimate the dynamic characteristics of the exoskeleton. The prospect of this project is to perform more experiments on the exoskeleton and brush up on its design and control method prior to animal testing.