Abstract
Taking inspiration from the hypothesis of muscle synergies, we propose a method to generate open loop controllers for an agent solving point-to-point reaching tasks. The controller output is defined as a linear combination of a small set of predefined actuations, termed synergies. The method can be interpreted from a developmental perspective, since it allows the agent to autonomously synthesize and adapt an effective set of synergies to new behavioral needs. This scheme greatly reduces the dimensionality of the control problem, while keeping a good performance level. The framework is evaluated in a planar kinematic chain, and the quality of the solutions is quantified in several scenarios.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
d’Avella, A., Saltiel, P., Bizzi, E.: Combinations of muscle synergies in the construction of a natural motor behavior. Nat. Neurosci. 6, 300–308 (2003)
Ivanenko, Y.P., Cappellini, G., Dominici, N., Poppele, R.E., Lacquaniti, F.: Coordination of locomotion with voluntary movements in humans. J. Neurosci. 25(31), 7238–7253 (2005)
Cappellini, G., Ivanenko, Y.P., Poppele, R.E., Lacquaniti, F.: Motor patterns in human walking and running. J. Neurophysiol. 95(6), 3426–3437 (2006)
d’Avella, A., Fernandez, L., Portone, A., Lacquaniti, F.: Modulation of phasic and tonic muscle synergies with reaching direction and speed. J. Neurophysiol. 100(3), 1433–1454 (2008)
Dominici, N., Ivanenko, Y.P., Cappellini, G., D’Avella, A., Mondì, V., Cicchese, M., Fabiano, A., Silei, T., Di Paolo, A., Giannini, C., Poppele, R.E., Lacquaniti, F.: Locomotor primitives in newborn babies and their development. Science 334(6058), 997–999 (2011)
Nori, F.: Symbolic Control with Biologically Inspired Motion Primitives. PhD thesis, University of Genova (2005)
Alessandro, C., Nori, F.: Identification of synergies by optimization of trajectory tracking tasks. In: The Fourth IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, Roma, Italy, June 24-27, pp. 924–930 (2012)
Todorov, E., Ghahramani, Z.: Unsupervised learning of sensory-motor primitives. In: Proc. 25th Int. Conf. IEEE Eng. Med. & Biol. Soc., pp. 1750–1753. IEEE (2003)
Schaal, S., Peters, J., Nakanishi, J., Ijspeert, A.: Learning movement primitives. In: Dario, P., Chatila, R. (eds.) Robotics Research. Tracts in Adv. Rob., vol. 15, pp. 561–572. Springer (2005)
Hollerbach, J.M., Flash, T.: Dynamic interactions between limb segments during planar arm movement. Biol. Cybern. 44(1), 67–77 (1982)
Muceli, S., Boye, A.T., D’Avella, A., Farina, D.: Identifying representative synergy matrices for describing muscular activation patterns during multidirectional reaching in the horizontal plane. J. Neurophysiol. 103(3), 1532–1542 (2010)
Neptune, R.R., Clark, D.J., Kautz, S.A.: Modular control of human walking: a simulation study. J. Biomech. 42(9), 1282–1287 (2009)
Shkolnik, A., Tedrake, R.: Sample-based planning with volumes in configuration space. arXiv:1109.3145v1 (September 2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Alessandro, C., Carbajal, J.P., d’Avella, A. (2012). Synthesis and Adaptation of Effective Motor Synergies for the Solution of Reaching Tasks. In: Ziemke, T., Balkenius, C., Hallam, J. (eds) From Animals to Animats 12. SAB 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7426. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33093-3_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33093-3_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33092-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33093-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)