Underlying control strategy of human leg posture and movement

Abstract

While a great number of studies on human motor control have provided a wide variety of viewpoints concerning the strategy of the central nervous system (CNS) in controlling limb movement, none were able to reveal the exact methods how the movement command from CNS is mapped onto the neuromuscular activity. As a preliminary study of human-machine interface design, the characteristics of human leg motion and its underlying motor control scheme are studied through experiments and simulations in this paper. The findings in this study suggest a simple open-loop motor control scheme in leg motion. As a possible candidate, an equilibrium point control model appears consistent in recreating the experimental data in numerical simulations. Based on the general leg motion analysis, the braking motion by the driver’s leg is modeled.