Etienne Burdet (Imperial College London)

Abstract:
By investigating how humans deal with unstable dynamics, we could elucidate how humans adapt to the environment in order to carry unstable tasks typical of tool use, and how they learn to coordinate muscle appropriately through practice. The first part of this talk will review these results and show how this lead to a model motor adaptation, which can also be used as a new robot behaviour bringing flexibility to the control of interactive tasks. Recently we investigated interactive motor tasks between humans, using dual robotic interface that enable us to modulate the interaction between the partners. The second part of the presentation will describe some of the surprising results elucidating involuntary coordination patterns between humans and analyse the underlying control mechanism.