Abstract - Recently, bio-robotics which based on
robotics and biology, and neuro-robotics which based
on robotics and neuroscience have been attracting big
attention. In both of them, many studies have been
conducted referring to studies on animal behavior
which have been performed by animal psychologists
and biologists. An autonomous, robotic experimental
setup was then developed for the experiments to
investigate behavior of rodents especially rats in “openfield”.
This setup consists of a square open-field
surrounded by walls, a CCD camera above the openfield,
a food feeding machine, a water feeding machine,
sensors which measures rearing, sensors which
measures grooming and a PC to autonomously control
these machines and sensors. Grooming and rearing are
typical behavior of rats, and rats’ current emotional
state can be understood by the numbers of these
behaviors. Therefore, this experimental setup can be
useful to study rats’ emotion based on behavior
analysis. Several experiments will be performed using
this setup and it is expected that this setup contribute to
studies on behavior and emotion model of rodents.
Index Terms – Animal Behavior, An