A Distributed Motor Control System Based on the Spinal Cord and Musculoskeletal Mechanisms

Biological motor control system includes some time delay within the neural transmission loop, which makes the motor control unstable. It is well-known that the low-pass filtering for the actuator output can improve the system stability. On the other hand, it is estimated that the renshaw cell in the spinal reflex loop may provide the motor output with the low-pass filtering property. The present paper discusses the motor control mechanism as a hierarchical distributed control system including the time delay, and it is shown that the renshaw cell could contribute toward stabilizing the time delay loop in the hierarchical distributed control system. In addition it is shown that the control system can manage a complex task such as a cooperative problem between posture and motion control.