Emergence of Reflexive Behavior from Single Muscle Twitches

Due to growing needs of human society, it is expected that in future robots needs to interact with humans in a more collaborative way. To maximize potential for such interactions, different robots are being developed which imitate characteristics of human body. But still we don’t have any standard technique to control such robots. To solve this problem, development robotics explores mechanism of human development and tries to answer this problem. We are interested to study, how motor control develop through autonomous physical interactions with environment. In this paper, we explored how basic reflexes(the myotatic reflex, reverse myotatic reflex and reciprocal inhibition reflex) can be learned through such interaction. In this paper we used single muscle twitches for interaction with environment. In our approach we look at biology not only for inspiration but also for validation. The reflexes studied here are relatively well understood in biology, and there are models available which can be used to validate our results. We believe, if we find a principle according to which human reflex connectivity can be autonomously developed, we can then potentially apply the same principle to generate appropriate reflexive behaviour in robotic platforms.