Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences
Tohoku University

Animals escape from predators, search for food, and seek out breeding partners for survival. When we see such lively behavior of animals, we strongly feel the existence of intelligence in animals. I believe that we can make robots have natural intelligence by understanding the control mechanisms underlying adaptive and versatile animal behavior, how animals achieve the desired behavior reasonably while grasping the situation around them.

For this purpose, here I focus on the intelligence underlying animal locomotion because animals achieve various behaviors (tasks) through navigating complex environments even if their final purposes are different. My study aims to extract the fundamental principles of flexible motor control in animals through a synthetic approach. Specifically, I construct mathematical models based on the findings from behavioral experiments and validate them by computer simulation and physical robots.