ETH Pattus – A Robotic Platform to Study Motor Learning and Recovery in Rodents

The ETH Pattus is a robotic platform designed for motor learning experiments with rodents. This device allows the implementation of force fields to guide or perturb forelimb motion in a well-controlled and reproducible manner, and provides a quantitative assessment of movement kinematics. The ETH Pattus opens up new research avenues for the characterization of motor learning stages, both in healthy and in stroke animal models.

ETH Pattus

Animal models have high potential to help investigate and better understand brain mechanisms involved in skill learning and motor recovery. Skill learning typically requires the training of tasks that are not familiar to the animal, such as skilled forelimb reaching. However, conventionally used skilled reaching paradigms are restricted to a binary performance measure (i.e. was the movement successful or not?). In these setups, additional information about movement strategies and kinematics can only be extracted by observation or from video tracking, which are unprecise and/or suffer from evaluator subjectivity. It is therefore difficult to investigate of motor learning or recovery as was done in human experiments.

We have designed the ETH Pattus, a three degree-of-freedom end-effector robotic platform. It was designed for interaction with forelimb movements in rats and allows for automated training and accurate behavioral readout in the form of interaction kinematics (Vigaru et al., 2011, 2013). The ETH Pattus allows planar movement and pronation/supination of the rat forelimb. It was designed to meet the kinematic requirements of rat forelimb movements (e.g. planar reaching, grasping and pulling). Rats interact with the robot by manipulating a spherical handle to perform a specific motor task, and are automatically rewarded when they accomplish the task correctly. This automated setup and reward system not only increases the experimental time efficiency, but substantially decreases experimental error that could be caused by the human operator.

Currently, three ETH Pattus are being used in different studies in collaboration with partners from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. Initial findings allowed us to draw parallels between animal and human/primate models of motor learning during the training of complex reaching tasks. These results open new research questions and highlight the potential of our robotic approach to investigate morphological and physiological bases of motor learning (Lambercy et al., 2015).

Funding

  • ETH Zurich
  • Swiss National Science Foundation through the National Center of Competence in Neural Plasticity and Repair (NCCR Neuro)

Publications

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