Motivation for studying
Human Motor Control
Amir Karniel
Biological motor control presents a great challenge for
scientists and engineers. "Simple" tasks such as playing with a ball are
much more difficult for artificial machines than many "intelligent" tasks
such as playing a game of Chess.
The broad target of this research is to reveal the secrets
of the biological motor control system by building a model of its operation,
and examining its properties with analytical tools as well as numerical
simulations. Three different reasons motivate this research: the patient,
the robot and the brain.
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Paralyzed patients can improve their quality of life by an artificial limb
or external stimulation of their muscles. In order to design these aids,
one needs a model of the biological motor control system.
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Robots are inferior to people and animals in many aspects. One of the promising
directions to improve our technology is by imitating nature and learning
from its ingenious solutions.
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The main outputs of the nervous system are the muscles, and motor control
is the salient evolutionary drive for the development of the brain. Therefor
the act of modeling and understanding the motor control system can be symbolized
as polishing the window to the secrets of the brain.