The challenges in understanding human motor control, in brain-machine interfaces

and anthropomorphic robotics are currently converging. Modern anthropomorphic

robots with their compliant actuators and various types of sensors (e.g., depth

and vision cameras, tactile fingertips, full-body skin, proprioception) have

reached the perceptuomotor complexity faced in human motor control and learning.

While outstanding robotic and prosthetic devices exist, current brain machine

interfaces (BMIs) and robot learning methods have not yet reached the required

autonomy and performance needed to enter daily life.

For truly autonomous robotic and prosthetic devices four major challenges have

to be addressed. These fields can be grouped into the major area of

Neurorobotics and are, (1) the decomposability of complex motor skills into

basic primitives organized in complex architectures, (2) the ability to learn

from partial observable noisy observations of inhomogeneous high-dimensional

sensor data, (3) the learning of abstract features, generalizable models and

transferable policies from human demonstrations, sparse rewards and through

active learning, and (4), accurate predictions of self-motions, object dynamics

and of humans movements for assisting and cooperating autonomous systems.

My contributions are probabilistic computational models that can be trained from

high-dimensional input streams of neural and artificial data (e.g., action

potentials, movement kinematics, joint forces, EMG signals, tactile readings).

The learned models are evaluated in human motor adaptation experiments and in

robot reaching and balancing tasks. These probabilistic models can be

co-activated and sequenced in time as movement primitives and can be modulated

by a small set of control parameters to generalize to new tasks. In neural

network implementations forward and inverse kinematic models are learned

simultaneously and used to generate movement plans in a compliant humanoid

robot. The neural models capture the correlations of the input and can forecast

self-motions or co-workers intentions as demonstrated in a recent human

adaptation experiment which showed that postural control precedes and predicts

volitional motor control.