Left/Right Brain, human motor control and the implications for robotics

TL;DR

This study investigates a bilateral neural network architecture inspired by human brain hemispheres to improve robotic motor control, demonstrating specialized hemispheric functions and effective collaboration for different tasks.

Contribution

Introduces a biologically inspired bilateral neural network architecture with hemispheric specialization for improved robotic motor control.

Findings

Bilateral models outperform non-preferred systems in their tasks.

Hemispheric specialization enhances task-specific performance.

Models with inter-hemispheric connectivity perform comparably or better.

Abstract

Neural Network movement controllers promise a variety of advantages over conventional control methods, however, they are not widely adopted due to their inability to produce reliably precise movements. This research explores a bilateral neural network architecture as a control system for motor tasks. We aimed to achieve hemispheric specialisation similar to what is observed in humans across different tasks; the dominant system (usually the right hand, left hemisphere) excels at tasks involving coordination and efficiency of movement, and the non-dominant system performs better at tasks requiring positional stability. Specialisation was achieved by training the hemispheres with different loss functions tailored to the expected behaviour of the respective hemispheres. We compared bilateral models with and without specialised hemispheres, with and without inter-hemispheric connectivity (representing the biological Corpus Callosum), and unilateral models with and without specialisation. The models were trained and tested on two tasks common in the human motor control literature: the random reach task, suited to the dominant system, a model with better coordination, and the hold position task, suited to the non-dominant system, a model with more stable movement. Each system outperformed the non-preferred system in its preferred task. For both tasks, a bilateral model outperformed the non-preferred hand and was as good or better than the preferred hand. The results suggest that the hemispheres could collaborate on tasks or work independently to their strengths. This study provides ideas for how a biologically inspired bilateral architecture could be exploited for industrial motor control.