Chapter 9: The Nature and Structure of Feasible Sets (under construction)

Last updated Dec. 26 2015 by Francisco Valero-Cuevas

Abstract:

An engineering perspective is inherently incomplete when applied to science. However, as per the words of Galileo Galilei at the beginning of this book, science is also not complete without a mathematical foundation. Our large community applied this mathematics-based perspective for decades to understand motor control. This has resulted in a large, informative, useful, and fruitful body of work. I now comment briefly on how the neuromechanical framework of this book applies to some current tenets, theories, and debates in motor control. In particular, if we agree that the mechanical principles outlined in this book are relevant to the structure of vertebrate limbs, then the nature and structure of the feasible sets they allow are relevant to their neural control. In this chapter I present brief descriptions of how our community has approached understanding the nature and structure of the high-dimensional feasible activation sets.

Forum and commentary:

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Exercises:

All code to produce vectormaps with MatLab, and plot descriptive statistics with R

Valero-Cuevas FJ, Cohn BA, Yngvason HF, Lawrence EL.   
Exploring the high-dimensional structure of muscle redundancy via subject-specific and generic musculoskeletal models   
Journal of Biomechanics, ASB Special Issue, 48(11): p. 2887-96, 2015.

Explore vectormap code on GitHub
Download up-to-date code as a Zip File
To walk through a well-commented usage of the library, open Matlab, set the working directory to the main vectormap folder, & run through the following file line by line:

edit test_task_vector_bounds

Additional references and suggested reading:

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Code:

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© Francisco Valero-Cuevas 2015