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Dana Ballard

 

 

 

(Department of Computer Sciences University of California)

 

Tuesday 12th June 2012

16:00

 

B10 Seminar Room, Basement,

Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR

 

 

A new look at human motor control

 

Modeling the generation of human movement can be extraordinarily difficult owing to the complexity of the underlying musculoskeletal system. The dynamics equations are non-linear and have many degrees of freedom, making them all but intractable to solve directly. We posit that this system can be simplified if its movements are modeled as a set of basis movements that can be adapted to varying conditions. We show that the command torques for such movements can be read out by a dynamic model that is constrained to follow human movements as measured by a motion capture system. The resultant torques can be replayed in the model to reproduce the original movements provided they are augmented by linear stabilizing terms. The resultant system provides a novel method of modeling human dynamics and suggests a novel way of formulating and solving the general problem of controlling human movement.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~dana/