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Roadmap

Overview​

The Virtual Rodent roadmap describes the planned progression of the project from the current Sprint 1 implementation toward a complete and extensible behavioural simulation platform.

The roadmap is divided into development stages so that the core simulation can be established before more advanced functionality is introduced.

Current Stage — Sprint 1​

The current development stage focuses on establishing the core integrated simulation.

Experiment Interface​

  • Main application layout
  • Experiment settings
  • Start, pause and reset controls
  • Simulation speed controls
  • Experiment selection
  • Experiment editing
  • Experiment saving and loading
  • Integration of team features

3D Arena​

  • 3D environment
  • Floor and walls
  • Corridors
  • Shelter
  • Bridge
  • Named regions
  • Arena materials
  • Camera controls
  • Collision shapes
  • Openable and closable barriers
  • Arena boundary enforcement

Rat Simulation​

  • Vector3 movement
  • Rat model
  • Configurable rat characteristics
  • Movement and turning
  • Wall collision
  • Explorer behaviour
  • Balanced behaviour
  • Shelter Seeker behaviour
  • Deterministic movement

Stimuli and Recording​

  • Light stimuli
  • Odour stimuli
  • Sound stimuli
  • Step-based stimulus scheduling
  • Treatment conditions
  • Dose and administration timing
  • State recording
  • Treatment event recording
  • User intervention recording
  • JSON export
  • CSV export
  • Automated tests
  • Determinism testing

Next Stage — Integration and Refinement​

After the individual Sprint 1 features are completed, the focus will move toward integration and refinement.

Planned work includes:

  • Integrating all feature branches
  • Resolving integration issues
  • Testing interactions between components
  • Improving simulation stability
  • Verifying experiment reproducibility
  • Testing the complete application workflow
  • Refining experiment configuration
  • Improving error handling
  • Completing documentation

Future Simulation Development​

Future development can extend the simulation beyond the initial behavioural models.

Potential areas include:

  • More sophisticated behavioural models
  • Additional rat characteristics
  • More complex environmental interactions
  • Additional arena configurations
  • More advanced stimulus models
  • Expanded treatment protocols
  • Improved experimental controls
  • Larger and more complex experimental environments

Data and Analysis​

The recorded simulation data provides a foundation for future analysis.

Potential future functionality includes:

  • Statistical analysis of behavioural patterns
  • Automated experiment comparison
  • Behavioural visualisation
  • Aggregate experiment results
  • Data-processing pipelines
  • Python-based analysis tools

Machine Learning Integration​

A future goal is to integrate the simulation with Python-based machine learning tools.

The planned architecture is:

Virtual Rodent
      ↓
Experiment Data
      ↓
JSON / CSV
      ↓
Python
      ↓
PyTorch
      ↓
Machine Learning Models

This could allow simulation data to be used for model training, behavioural prediction and further experimentation.

Documentation and Delivery​

The project documentation will continue to be updated throughout development.

The final documentation will cover:

  • Project methodology
  • Git methodology
  • Technology stack
  • Development plan
  • Roadmap
  • System design
  • UI design
  • User guide
  • Testing
  • Implementation details

The documentation will be deployed as a publicly accessible static website using Docusaurus and Cloudflare Pages.

Long-Term Vision​

The long-term objective is to provide a configurable and reproducible virtual environment that can be used to conduct controlled behavioural experiments without requiring every experiment to be performed using a physical environment.

The architecture is designed to support increasingly sophisticated environmental models, behavioural models, experimental conditions and data-analysis workflows while maintaining reproducibility and traceability.

AI Attribution: The preceding document was generated and edited with assistance from ChatGPT Web (GPT-5.6 Luna).