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Self-organization of Spinal Reflexes Involving Homonymous, Antagonist and Synergistic Interactions

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7426))

Abstract

Recent results in spinal research are challenging the historical view that the spinal reflexes are mostly hardwired and fixed behaviours. In previous work we have shown that three of the simplest spinal reflexes could be self-organised in an agonist-antagonist pair of muscles. The simplicity of these reflexes is given from the fact that they entail at most one interneuron mediating the connectivity between afferent inputs and efferent outputs. These reflexes are: the Myotatic, the Reciprocal Inibition and the Reverse Myotatic reflexes. In this paper we apply our framework to a simulated 2D leg model actuated by six muscles (mono- and bi-articular). Our results show that the framework is successful in learning most of the spinal reflex circuitry as well as the corresponding behaviour in the more complicated muscle arrangement.

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Marques, H.G., Völk, K., König, S., Iida, F. (2012). Self-organization of Spinal Reflexes Involving Homonymous, Antagonist and Synergistic Interactions. 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_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33093-3_27

  • 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)

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