Search results for "Central pattern generator"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Quantifying coordination and coordination variability in backward versus forward running: Implications for control of motion
2015
The aims of this study were to compare coordination and coordination variability in backward and forward running and to investigate the effects of speed on coordination variability in both backward and forward running. Fifteen healthy male participants took part in this study to run forwards and backwards on a treadmill at 80%, 100% and 120% of their preferred running speeds. The coordinate data of passive reflective markers attached to body segments were recorded using motion capture systems. Coordination of shank-foot and thigh-shank couplings in sagittal plane was quantified using the continuous relative phase method. Coordination variability was calculated as the standard deviation of a…
How a Fish’s Brain May Move a Fish’s Body
1990
The brainstem of the electric fish Eigenmannia virescens contains a small number of neural networks projecting directly onto the motoneuron pools of the spinal cord such that each segment is reached by at least one neuron of all the networks. Quantitative data of movement patterns, recorded from freely moving animals as well as elicited by electrical stimulation of the single networks, suggest that each network contains a full program for a particular movement, e. g. bending of the body axis to one side. By virtue of the structural relationship the programs are executable with a small number of segments. Mixing of small pieces of programs along the body axis allows for a far larger variety …
Controlling and learning motor functions
2018
Effective and adaptive motor functions are important for living beings and developing computational and learning mechanisms for roving robots is a crucial aspect in biorobotics. In this chapter we report a new architecture for motor learning to be applied in insect-like walking robots. The proposed model is based on the MB structure previously introduced able to memorize time evolutions of key parameters of the neural motor controller to improve existing motor primitives. The adopted control scheme enables the structure to efficiently cope with goal-oriented behavioural motor tasks. The problem of body-size evaluation is also considered and a model for the parallax-based estimation is provi…
Speeding up gait initiation and gait-pattern with a startling stimulus.
2008
Human gait involves a repetitive leg motor pattern that emerges after gait initiation. While the automatic maintenance of the gait-pattern may be under the control of subcortical motor centres, gait initiation requires the voluntary launching of a different motor program. In this study, we sought to examine how the two motor programmes respond to an experimental manipulation of the timing of gait initiation. Subjects were instructed to start walking as soon as possible at the perception of an imperative signal (IS) that, in some interspersed trials was accompanied by a startling auditory stimulus (SAS). This method is known to shorten the latency for execution of the motor task under prepar…