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Will robots ever walk like humans?
Some researchers are turning away from bipedal adaptability
The challenge of developing a bipedal robot isn’t just that we haven’t pieced together all the mechanics of walking or even that we don’t fully know what the feedback loops look like between our learning bodies and our developing brains. It’s also that we don’t know how the human brain works.
Work on pigeons by French physician Marie Jean Pierre Flourens in the 1800s told us much about the vestibular system’s role in balance. Flourens studied conditions related to the vestibular systems by looking at what happened to pigeons when their ear’s semicircular canal was cut. Observing the pigeons’ changed head movements, he realized that the canal was heavily involved in controlling posture and balance.
Research on diseases like Parkinson’s over the past three decades has begun to narrow down the various areas of the brain used to control gait and balance. In a study published in Cell, for example,
“scientists discovered that the go and stop pathways from the BG control locomotion by regulating a group of nerve cells in the brainstem that connects the brain to the spinal cord.”
And work on brain lesions and brain injuries has furthered an understanding of how deeply the brain and the vestibular system are intertwined both for…
