Reciprocal excitation between biological and robotic research

While biological principles have inspired researchers in computational and engineering research for a long time, there is still rather limited knowledge flow back from computational to biological domains. This paper presents examples of our work where research on anthropomorphic robots lead us to new insights into explaining biological movement phenomena, starting from behavioral studies up to brain imaging studies. Our research over the past years has focused on principles of trajectory formation with nonlinear dynamical systems, on learning internal models for nonlinear control, and on advanced topics like imitation learning. The formal and empirical analyzes of the kinematics and dynamics of movements systems and the tasks that they need to perform lead us to suggest principles of motor control that later on we found surprisingly related to human behavior and even brain activity.