Acquisition of synergistic motor responses through cerebellar learning in a robotic postural task

Abstract

Coordination of synergistic movements is a crucial aspect of goal oriented motor behavior in postural control. It has been proposed that the cerebellum could be involved in the acquisition of adaptive fine-tuned motor responses. However, it remains unclear whether motor patterns and action sequences can be learned as a result of recurrent connections among multiple cerebellar microcircuits. Within this study we hypothesize that such link could be found in the Nucleo-Pontine projection and we investigate the behavioral advantages of cerebellar driven synergistic motor responses in a robotic postural task. We devise a scenario where a double-joint cart-pole robot has to learn to stand and balance interconnected segments by issuing multiple actions in order to minimize the deviation from a state of equilibrium. Our results show that a cerebellum based architecture can efficiently learn to reduce errors through well-timed motor coordination. We also suggest that such strategy could reduce energy cost by progressively synchronizing multiple joints movements. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.