Robotics Laboratory Part of the  Sensory Motor Performance Program Room 1385, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago  345 East Superior Street  Chicago, IL 60611 (312) 238-1232 312-238-2208 FAX

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OVERVIEW

The activities of this lab are aimed at understanding the sensory-motor system through the close interaction with the themes and technologies used for developing artificial systems and to endow them with intelligent behaviors. We wish to create knowledge that can help restore motor functions lost to stroke and other neuromotor impairments. A fundamental condition to achieve this goal is to understand how the brain acquires and organizes the competence that we take for granted in carrying out daily activities as "simple" as filling a glass of water or signing a postcard. The study of motor behavior in biological beings and in artificial systems has revolutionized our ideas on intelligence. Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate for Economics, once predicted that it will be easier to create an artificial college professor than an artificial bulldozer driver. And indeed many of the motor skills that we take for granted in everyday life require solving extremely complex problems. For example, when we bring a glass full of water to our mouth, we must keep the glass at a fixed vertical orientation while it moves along a path from the table to our lips. To do so, we contract several muscles in a very precise and timely fashion. Even a small error in the timing or amplitude of these torques would be sufficient to take the hand off course or to spill the water. From a mathematical standpoint, to guide the glass our brain solves a very complex system of equations that would take several printed pages just to be written down. Dealing with these equations is a formidable exercise even for those with a graduate degree in mechanics. And for a long time, robotic scientists have struggled with the task of finding efficient ways to program computers so that they can solve these equations in real time.

But perhaps the most remarkable feature of our brain is that it does not need to be programmed all at once. The brain is provided with mechanisms that allow it to program itself "on the go", based on experience. What exactly these mechanisms are is not yet known and this is a subject of intense investigation to which our laboratory is participating along with many others. In this laboratory, we use robotics technologies to investigate how we adapt to radical changes in body mechanics. Our evidence indicates that indeed our nervous system is capable of overcoming radical mechanical changes by developing accurate internal representations of the environment in which we move. We are studying how this adaptive process may be used for rehabilitation. Other studies within our group are directed at investigating the cellular mechanisms of motor learning by establishing a two-way communication between neural tissue and a simple robotic system. This allows us to relate neural events to well-defined artificial behaviors and to observe the evolution of plastic changes through the observable changes in these artificial behaviors.