A Compositional Neuro-Controller for Advanced Motor Control Tasks

Abstract: Humans and animals developed a sophisticated motor control apparatus and there is much evidence that it has a modular structure. The modularity offers a range of benefits, e.g. ability to learn dissociable motion styles without interference and forgetting, fast adaptation and de-adaptation to changes conditions. However in robotics, building a controller that can efficiently incrementally learn new motion styles and provide switching between them is a formidable challenge. In this paper we address the problem by proposing a novel biologically inspired compositional neuro-controller. We have shown that the compositional controller is able to reproduce a set of trajectories more efficiently comparing to a simple controller, exploiting incremental learning benefits. Second, we have demonstrated that the proposed controller is able to learn different locomotion styles and switch between them in a simulated robot-snake.