Meeting Abstract
Rapid legged locomotion is of critical importance for many animal species. In most natural environments, animals cannot rely on the ground being predictably flat. We present a result from nonlinear control showing that under most circumstances animals should be able to select a feed-forward strategy that would eliminate the uncertainty in movement generated by non-flat terrain. Since this strategy requires no sensory feedback, it may be implemented morphologically in the shape of the body and the mechanical structure of the limbs. We demonstrate such a strategy for the Spring Loaded Inverted Pendulum model of running. We hypothesize that such controllers appear in some rapidly running organisms. In such systems, no investigation of neural feedback could reveal the dominant mechanism of control, and analysis of neuronal responses would at best be misleading.
