Abstract
One of the main problems in motor control is how the Central Nervous System (CNS) can deal with the multiplicity of muscles and the complex geometry of the human body. The observation that muscles behave as elastic elements (that is, as springs), thus being able to store elastic potential energy, implies that a posture corresponds to a minimum potential energy configuration of the whole musculoskeletal system; moreover, there is some experimental evidence that even during movements the intermediate body configurations are also equilibrium postures. These findings led to the hypothesis (known as Equilibrium Point (EP) hypothesis, see (Feldman, Adamovich, Ostry, & Flanagan, 1990) for a review) that the generation of movements is made by the CNS in terms of the equilibrium or virtual trajectory, which is only influenced by the “static” components of the involved mechanical structures (muscles. ligaments, joints, bones), whereas viscous and inertial effects act as “perturbations”, so that real trajectories may differ from virtual ones; The main advantage is that there is no need to explicitly solve the inverse dynamic problem; however, the problem of translating a desired equilibrium configuration into the corresponding muscle activations is still ill-posed because the number of muscles is usually much greater than the number of degrees of freedom.
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This work was partly supported by the Esprit Basic Research Action SPEECH-MAPS.
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© 1994 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Sanguineti, V., Morasso, P. (1994). Self-Organization of an Equilibrium-Point motor controller. In: Marinaro, M., Morasso, P.G. (eds) ICANN ’94. ICANN 1994. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2097-1_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2097-1_20
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