A corticospinal network for control of voluntary movements of a physiologically based experimental platform

Abstract

In this paper, we present a corticospinal network for control voluntary movements within constraints from neurophysiology. Neural controller is proposed to follow desired joint trajectories of a single link controlled by an agonist-antagonist pair of actuator with muscle-like properties. This research work involves the design and implementation of an efficient biomechanical model of the animal muscular actuation system. In this biomechanical system the implementation of a mathematical model for whole skeletal muscle force generation on DC motors is carried out. Through experimental results, we showed that neural controller exhibits key kinematic properties of human movements, dynamics compensation and including asymmetric bell-shaped velocity profiles. Neural controller suggests how the brain may set automatic and volitional gating mechanisms to vary the balance of static and dynamic feedback information to guide the movement command and to compensate for external forces. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.