An Integrated Neurorobotics Model of the Cerebellar-Basal Ganglia Circuitry

Abstract

This work presents a neurorobotics model of the brain that integrates the cerebellum and the basal ganglia regions to coordinate movements in a humanoid robot. This cerebellar-basal ganglia circuitry is well known for its relevance to the motor control used by most mammals. Other computational models have been designed for similar applications in the robotics field. However, most of them completely ignore the interplay between neurons from the basal ganglia and cerebellum. Recently, neuroscientists indicated that neurons from both regions communicate not only at the level of the cerebral cortex but also at the subcortical level. In this work, we built an integrated neurorobotics model to assess the capacity of the network to predict and adjust the motion of the hands of a robot in real time. Our model was capable of performing different movements in a humanoid robot by respecting the sensorimotor loop of the robot and the biophysical features of the neuronal circuitry. The experiments were executed in simulation and the real world. We believe that our proposed neurorobotics model can be an important tool for new studies on the brain and a reference toward new robot motor controllers.