Beyond Control: The Dynamics of Brain-Body-Environment Interaction in Motor Systems

this is a book chapter that is an excellent review of Randy's career. He has a pun on the second page. very bad.

Oh, about the model of the six legged robot, i forgot to share it architecture: "Individual leg circuits were fully-interconnected, whereas homologous neurons in each adjacent leg circuit were bidirectionally interconnected. Several symmetries were also imposed on the neural circuits, so that all leg controllers shared the same parameters and corresponding connections were mirrored both across and along the body"

I nee dthis quote myself: " These evolved model walkers present us with a remarkable opportunity. Because we have complete access to and control over all neural parameters and actifity, we can analyze the operation of individual pattern generators in great detail. Because we have similar access tothe model body, we can also study the interplay between central and peripheral porperties in the generation of a walking pattern. Because we have such a large population of evolved walkers, we can ask quations about general principles and individual variability. Because we have access to their complete evolutionary history, we can also examine the process by which successful walkers evolve, and the impact of various modeling assumptions on their evolution. "

"the overall patterns of motor outputs are rather similar across these ten CPGs, while the interneuron activities are quite different. Since the interneuron actifities are far less constrained by the boldy than the motor neurons, this is to be espected. " Next to this I wrote "I'm pretty sure this is deep, just not clear how"

I'm not positive yet, but I think Ijspeert's CPGs are Randy's MPGs.

"Because of this variability, we found that averagin g the parameters of the best CPGs produced circuits that failed to oscillate. Failure of averaging has also been observed in more biophysically-realistic model neurons."

"Thus, a given level of walking performance can be achieved by many idffernt sets of neural parameters. This degeneracy gives rise to the multiple instantiability of pattern generators that we have observed, and it is the strucute of such degeneracy that we ultimately with to understand" -This quote is a big deal.

"Experiments h ave shown that seeding evoluationary searches with random center-crossing circuits can signiticaly imporve the evolvability of oscillarory dynamics." -I don't understand that but it sounds important

He gives a paragraph to how one might use dynamical approaches to modeling sequential action, like reaching.