Bio-inspired control of eye-head coordination in a robotic anthropomorphic head

In this paper we address the problem of executing fast gaze shifts toward a visual target with a robotic platform. The robotic platform is represented by an anthropomorphic head with seven degrees of freedom (DOFs) that was designed to mimic the physical dimensions (i.e. geometry and masses), the performances (i.e. angle and velocities) and the functional abilities (i.e. neck-movements and eyes vergence) of the human head. In the proposed approach the problem of coordinating and exploiting a fast gaze shift is investigated by inserting the knowledge of long-lasting neuro-physiologic studies into the control paradigm of the robot. The major advantage of this approach is that the problem of controlling the robotic artifact is reformulated as a sensory-motor integration problem. In this case, the design of the robot control itself takes great advantages of the existing neuroscientific knowledge in the field. In this approach the "golden performance" of the robotic head is represented by the accurate eye-head coordination that is observed during head-free gaze saccades in humans. To this aim, we implemented and tested on the robotic head a well-characterized, biologically inspired model of gaze control and we verified if the resulting motor output were coherent with the reported patterns of eye-head coordination in humans