Design and validation of a virtual player for studying interpersonal coordination in the mirror game
C. Zhai; F. Alderisio; P. Słowiński; et al.K. Tsaneva-Atanasova; M. di Bernardo
Date: 7 March 2017
Article
Journal
IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Publisher DOI
Abstract
The mirror game has been recently proposed as
a simple, yet powerful paradigm for studying interpersonal
interactions. It has been suggested that a virtual partner able
to play the game with human subjects can be an effective tool
to affect the underlying neural processes needed to establish the
necessary connections between the ...
The mirror game has been recently proposed as
a simple, yet powerful paradigm for studying interpersonal
interactions. It has been suggested that a virtual partner able
to play the game with human subjects can be an effective tool
to affect the underlying neural processes needed to establish the
necessary connections between the players, and also to provide
new clinical interventions for rehabilitation of patients suffering
from social disorders. Inspired by the motor processes of the
central nervous system (CNS) and the musculoskeletal system in
the human body, in this paper we develop a novel interactive
cognitive architecture based on nonlinear control theory to drive
a virtual player (VP) to play the mirror game with a human
player (HP) in different configurations. Specifically, we consider
two cases: the former where the VP acts as leader and the latter
where it acts as follower. The crucial problem is to design a
feedback control architecture capable of imitating and following
or leading a human player in a joint action task. Movement of
the end-effector of the VP is modeled by means of a feedback
controlled Haken-Kelso-Bunz (HKB) oscillator, which is coupled
with the observed motion of the HP measured in real time.
To this aim, two types of control algorithms (adaptive control
and optimal control) are used and implemented on the HKB
model so that the VP can generate a human-like motion while
satisfying certain kinematic constraints. A proof of convergence
of the control algorithms is presented in the paper together
with an extensive numerical and experimental validation of their
effectiveness. A comparison with other existing designs is also
discussed, showing the flexibility and the advantages of our
control-based approach.
Mathematics and Statistics
Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy
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