Meeting Abstract
Birds are a diverse and successful class of vertebrates with exceptional locomotor agility and ecological range, capable of many combinations of aerial, terrestrial, and aquatic locomotion. Despite great diversity, birds all share a consistent bauplan and rely on bipedal locomotion for at least part of their life history. Thus birds provide a valuable opportunity to investigate how body size and locomotor ecology influence the biomechanics and sensorimotor control of bipedal gait. Bipedal animals must precisely control limb-substrate interactions to move effectively over varied and uncertain terrain while avoiding injury. One key source of uncertainty is sensorimotor delay that limits feedback response times. This delay necessitates effective integration of intrinsic mechanics with predictive and reactive sensorimotor control mechanisms. My research team study non-steady locomotor behaviours to understand how birds effectively integrate mechanics and sensorimotor control. We collaborate with robotics engineers to test control principles inferred from avian studies. In this talk, I will discuss specific limb control mechanisms used by birds to achieve agile and stable gait, and functional trade-offs that likely influence scaling of gait with body size. I will highlight specific morphological and sensorimotor specializations of birds that might help explain their exceptional locomotor agility. In ongoing work, we are investigating perching balance control, to understand how balance sense is integrated with proprioception, spinal neural circuits and intrinsic leg mechanics. We hope the principles revealed from these studies will lead to bird-inspired control strategies for agile autonomous robots.
