Short course in Computational Motor Control

This is a short course that provides a tutorial for the mathematics that has been used to formulate problems in motor control. The course meets twice a week, Wednesday and Fridays, 8-9AM, Traylor 416, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The course started on Wednesday May 18, 2011. All are welcome.

Instructor: Reza Shadmehr

Lecture 1: Introduction

Lecture 2: Kinematic cost functions, minimum jerk, and Jacobians. Text Slides

Lecture 3: Muscle forces, joint torques, and lengths.
A model of primary and secondary muscle spindles. Model of gamma-motor neurons. Text Slides

Lecture 4: Stiffness of the arm, as measured in endpoint and joint coordinates. Slides

Lectures 5-8: Introduction to dynamics: motion of rigid bodies as minimization of an energy based cost, linear and angular momentum, and inertia. These lectures conclude with derivation of dynamics for an arm-like system, and description of a controller that uses an “inverse model” to move the system from one position to another along a desired trajectory. Slides

Lecture 9: Introduction to optimal control: Costs and rewards of movements. This lecture covers the material from Chapter 10 of the Biological Learning and Control book. Text Slides