How is sensory feedback used to tune elastic systems?
Cane toads use elastic elements in their forelimbs as brakes to absorb impacts during landing. In collaboration with Gary Gillis, I’ve been exploring how anurans integrate sensory information to tune elastic elements essential to coordinated landing. To do this, we’ve performed several experiments to conflict or ablate sensory information and evaluated the influence on landing preparation.
Cox Gillis 2020 JEB |
Cane toad preparing for landing. Forelimbs extended, hind limbs retracted. Under the skin, the muscles of the shoulder and elbow are contracting to be ready to absorb impact forces.
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Using wearable robotics to uncover how organisms control elastic systems
Robobird: In collaboration with Jonas Rubenson and Greg Sawicki, I have built a lower limb orthosis for a guinea fowl. We’re exploring the musculoskeletal and neural adaptations to wearable robotics and trying to understand the sensory feedback mechanisms by which animals adapt to their use. Here the exoskeleton is a tool to systematically perturb the system to help us discern the rules the body uses to tune elastic systems to different environmental conditions. Cox Rubenson and Sawicki 2019 IEEE/ RSJ |
Musculoskeletal modeling to understand complex elastic systems
A musculoskeletal model allows us to explore complex dynamics that result from the interaction of many many elastic elements. We’ve developed a OpenSim lower limb model of the guinea fowl that can integrate our exoskeleton and be constrained by experimentally collected muscle activation, length or tendon force data. This allows us to estimate the excitation patterns of all muscles in the lower limb in response to an exoskeleton perturbation. This provide a platform for hypothesis generation for mechanistic explanations about how animals adapt at the robotic-biology interface that then can be evaluated experimentally.
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