Hierarchical Control of Maneuverability in Walking and Flying Insets- A Neurobiological and Hardware Model Approach

摘要

The primary goal of our project was to document common control schemes that allow animals to move seamlessly through very diverse and complex terrain. A common strategy among most animals relies upon interactions between circuitry in the brain that processes information from the numerous sensory systems on the animal's head and more local control circuitry that resides in the thoracic ganglia of arthropods or the spinal cords of vertebrates and that responds directly to sensory structures located upon specific appendages (Orlovsky et al., 1999; Ritzmann, 2010; Ritzmann and Buschges, 2007). The head sensors provide a large variety of information which is then processed in the brain to ultimately form descending commands. When these commands reach local control regions, they can re-direct the movements of legs or wings. The question posed by our original proposal was: How do these descending commands exert their influence on local control systems. Since the local reflexes act in locomotory patterns, while the head sensors are typically unpattcrned, the manner in which interactions occur is not always obvious. In our proposal, we suggested that a common control scheme could exist in various animals by which descending commands influenced movement, not by micromanaging changes, but rather by altering a few critical reflexes then allowing the resulting changes in movement to generate a cascade of additional reflex changes. Ultimately these processes could lead to a new stable set of joint movements associated with a completely different movement such as turning or climbing. Under this strategy, the higher centers work with local systems to influence re-directed movements through critical but subtle changes rather than dictating radically new actions.