Engineering Commons^™

Neuromechanical Model Of Rat Hindlimb Walking With Two-Layer Cpgs, Kaiyu Deng, Nicholas Szczecinski, Dirk Arnold, Emanuel Andrada, Martin Fischer, Roger Quinn, Alexander J. Hunt

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This work demonstrates a neuromechanical model of rat hindlimb locomotion undergoing nominal walking with perturbations. In the animal, two types of responses to perturbations are observed: resetting and non-resetting deletions. This suggests that the animal locomotor system contains a memory-like organization. To model this phenomenon, we built a synthetic nervous system that uses separate rhythm generator and pattern formation layers to activate antagonistic muscle pairs about each joint in the sagittal plane. Our model replicates the resetting and non-resetting deletions observed in the animal. In addition, in the intact (i.e., fully afferented) rat walking simulation, we observe slower recovery after …