Learning from the spinal cord

Abstract

The graceful control of multiarticulated limbs equipped with slow, non-linear actuators (muscles) is a difficult problem for which robotic engineering affords no general solution. The vertebrate spinal cord provides an existence proof that such control is, indeed, possible. The biological solution is complex and incompletely known, despite a century of meticulous neurophysiological research, celebrated in part by this symposium. This is frustrating for those who would reanimate paralysed limbs either through promoting regeneration of the injured spinal cord or by functional electrical stimulation. The importance of and general role played by the spinal cord might be more easily recognized by analogy to marionette puppets, another system in which a brain (the puppeteer's) must cope with a large number of partially redundant actuators (strings) moving a mechanical linkage with complex intrinsic properties.