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Chapter XII
A General Rhythmic
Pattern Generation Architecture
for Legged Locomotion
Zhijun Yang
Stirling University, UK
Felipe M.G. França
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
AbSTRACT
As an engine of almost all life phenomena, the motor information generated by the central nervous system
(CNS) plays a critical role in the activities of all animals. After a brief review of some recent research
results on locomotor central pattern generators (CPG), which is a concrete branch of studies on the
CNS generating rhythmic patterns, this chapter presents a novel, macroscopic and model-independent
approach to the retrieval of different patterns of coupled neural oscillations observed in biological
CPGs during the control of legged locomotion. Based on scheduling by multiple edge reversal (SMER),
a simple and discrete distributed synchroniser, various types of oscillatory building blocks (OBB) can
be reconfigured for the production of complicated rhythmic patterns and a methodology is provided for
the construction of a target artificial CPG architecture behaving as a SMER-like asymmetric Hopfield
neural networks.
INTRODUCTION
diagonally in relation to the front legs; for after
the right fore leg animals move the left hind leg,
then the left fore leg, and after it the right hind
leg.” However, he erroneously believes that the
bound gait is impossible: “If they moved the fore
legs at the same time and first, their progression
Animal gait analysis is an ancient science. As early
as two thousand years ago, Aristotle described the
walk of a horse in his treatise (Peek & Forster,
1936)
De Incessu Animalium
: “The back legs move
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