Title: A synthetic model for neuromuscular control

Authors: Shankar Srinivasan; Dinesh Mital; William Ebomoyi; Syed Haque

Addresses: Department of Health Informatics, University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey 07107-3001, USA. ' Department of Health Informatics, University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey 07107-3001, USA. ' Department of Health Studies, College of Health Science, Chicago State University, Chicago, Illinois 60628-1598, USA. ' Department of Health Informatics, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey 07107-3001, USA

Abstract: The movements of a limb, whether of a robot or an animal, follow the same physical laws of motion and can be characterised by mathematical equations derived from Newtonian and Lagrangian mechanics. In robotics these equations are utilised to derive the control torques from the desired task-level trajectories. But as the number of degrees of freedom increases, the computations that ensue are very large and time consuming and there is a veritable bottleneck for computing the inverse dynamics in real-time. Taking into consideration the number of muscles that there are in an animal body, it is quite evident that the inverse dynamics problem as viewed from the robotics point of view would be intractable and is probably not existent. In this paper, we report the use of 'equilibrium-point hypothesis' as a plausible solution for the inverse dynamics in neuromuscular control.

Keywords: neural models; motor control; synthetic models; kinesiology; equilibrium point hypothesis; mathematical modelling; biomechanics; robot control; applied Newtonian science; neuromuscular control; robotics; inverse dynamics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMEI.2012.048387

International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, 2012 Vol.4 No.3, pp.253 - 261

Published online: 11 Aug 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article