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Using the Ugo Basile Multi-Maze

Introduction

The Ugo Basile Multi-Maze (formerly called the Radial Arm Maze) system consists of a maze of up to 8 arms with motorized doors at the entrance to each arm. Each door can be controlled independently from within ANY-maze, allowing it to be opened or closed based on conditions in the test.

Setting up a Multi-Maze in your protocol

From ANY-maze's point of view, the doors in the Multi-Maze are on/off outputs, so to add a door to a protocol you need to add an on/off output.

Having done this, you will need to name the switch (probably something like 'Door 1'), and specify the state the switch should be in at the start of the test. When the switch is 'off' the door will be open, and when it is 'on' the door will be closed, so you will probably specify that it should be off (which is the default).

The Output switch item in the protocol list will have a sub-element called Port to use, and selecting it will allow you to choose which physical door this switch will control.

Opening and closing a door

Adding an on/off output to your protocol is one step in setting up your Multi-Maze, but this will just set the door to be either opened or closed at the start of the test. So how do you open or close the door during the test? The answer is that you use a procedure.

Specifically, you will create one or more procedures which will wait until some situation occurs when you want to change the state of a door, and will then perform one or more actions which will change the state of the door Output switches - either activating them (to close the door) or deactivating them (to open it).

For example, if you want to close 'Door 1' ten seconds after the start of the test, you would create a procedure which would consist of two statements: First 'Wait until : Time elapsed 10s' and then 'Action: Activate Door 1' - see figure 1.

Figure 1. This simple procedure will close 'Door 1' ten seconds after the test begins.

Procedures can be far more sophisticated than this, and you can create as many as you need - so you should be able to implement whatever paradigm your experiment requires.

See also:

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ANY-maze help topic T1275