A neural model for eye–head–arm coordination

Abstract

The coordinated movement of the eyes, the head and the arm is an important ability in both animals and humanoid robots. To achieve this the brain and the robot control system need to be able to perform complex non-linear sensory-motor transformations in the forward and inverse directions between many degrees of freedom. In this article, we apply an omni-directional basis function neural network to this task. The proposed network can perform 3-D coordinated gaze shifts and 3-D arm reaching movements to a visual target. Particularly, it can perform direct sensory-motor transformations to shift gaze and to execute arm reach movements and can also perform inverse sensory-motor transformations in order to shift gaze to view the hand.