Humanoids09
9th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots

By Francesco Lacquaniti,
University of Rome Tor Vergata and Scientific Institute Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome (Italy).

I will review the control of human movements, from arm reaching to stationary or moving targets, to drawing and writing, to whole-body movement and locomotion. Evidence will be presented for simplifying strategies to coordinate the time-varying changes of several limb segments at a time. Intersegmental coordination may emerge from the coupling of neural oscillators with each other and with limb mechanical oscillators. Muscle contraction intervenes at specified times to re-excite the intrinsic oscillations of the system when energy is lost. Coordinative control may result from an active tuning of the passive inertial and viscoelastic coupling among limb segments. I will show that motor programs can be described as a characteristic timing of muscle activations linked to specific kinematic events. In particular, I will show that muscle activity occurring during several human movements can be accounted for by four to five basic temporal components. The coordination of automatic rhythmic movements (such as locomotion) with voluntary discrete movements is accomplished through a superposition of motor programs or activation timings that are separately associated with each task. These motor programs are not inborn, but develop progressively with the nervous system maturation, as shown by our data gathered on infant locomotion.

About the speaker

Francesco Lacquaniti received an M.D. (1976) and a Specialty in Neurology (1980), both Summa cum Laude from the Medical Faculty of Turin University. After a post-doc in the Department of Physiology of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (1979-82), he joined the Italian National Research Council as Acting Director of the Centre of Neurophysiology in Milan (1983-1994). Subsequently, he was full professor of Physiology at Cagliari University and, since 1997, he holds the same position in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He is the director of the Centre of Space Bio-medicine at the same University and the director of the Laboratory of Neuro-Motor Physiology at the Scientific Institute Santa Lucia Foundation (Rome). He coordinates a large scale program on the Disorders of Motor and Cardiorespiratory Control funded by the Italian Space Agency. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Human Frontier Science Program, and Section Editor of Experimental Brain Research. He authored more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and edited 3 books. His main research interests focus on the neural representations of gravity and the neural laws of movement control.