Northwestern_HartmannLab

Welcome to the Hartmann Lab

Biomedical Engineering Mechanical Engineering

Northwestern University Institute for Neuroscience (NUIN)

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Home	JOB OPPORTUNITIES Post-doctoral Graduate (PhD, MS) Undergraduate

Hartmann Lab, August 2004
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Research Overview

We have ongoing collaborations with the
Laboratory for Intelligent Mechanical Systems
Jet Propulsion Laboratory

THE RAT VIBRISSAL (WHISKER) SYSTEM
Rats are nocturnal, burrowing animals that rely on their sense of touch to explore the world around them. Rats sweep their vibrissae back and forth in the air and against objects at frequencies typically between 5 and 12 Hz. This “whisking” behavior allows the rat to extract accurate information about an object’s spatial properties, including size, shape, position, orientation, and texture. Our laboratory uses the rat whisker system as a model to study how sensory feedback is used in real time to guide motor activity, and how movement enables sensory acquisition and perception.

ROBOTICS AND NEUROSCIENCE
Thirty years ago, the increased availability of personal computers revolutionized the ability of neuroscientists to model neurons at both the single-cell and network levels. "Computational Neuroscience" has emerged as a discipline in large part thanks to increasingly powerful computers. But computational models of sensory systems often omit a critical component of the sensing process in animals: sensor arrays move to acquire data. This omission tends to occur because system dynamics and real-world noise can be difficult or impossible to model in computer simulation. To accurately model the dynamics of animal movement and sensory acquisition, mechanical (robotic) models become essential. In our laboratory we:
(1) Study the nervous systems of animals to try to construct more agile and autonomous robots. We use both electrophysiological and behavioral techniques.
(2) Construct robots to better understand the nervous systems of animals.

More about our research ....