Description

Dr. Thrishantha Nanayakkara from Imperial College, London delivered a talk on "Robotics in BME" on 13th of August 2019 as a part of the BME seminar series organized by the IEEE EMBS Student Branch Chapter of University of Moratuwa. Abstract of Talk : The neuroscience community has long been trying to understand how the central nervous system is managing the concurrent control of the whole body with many degrees of freedom to survive in situations that need fast responses, but with slow communication pathways. The robotics community too has addressed the same problem of surviving in uncertain environments by efficiently solving the concurrent computation problems. In this talk, he showed some recent findings in his lab that show the physical structures in the body work in conjunction with neural controllers to solve control problems locally. This phenomenon is called "morphological computation - the computation that spans across neural, musculoskeletal, and environmental circuits. He described how they test some of these hypotheses using laboratory made robotic devices.