Adaptive saccade controller inspired by the primates' cerebellum

Saccades are fast eye movements that allow humans and robots to bring the visual target in the center of the visual field. Saccades are open loop with respect to the vision system, thus their execution require a precise knowledge of the internal model of the oculomotor system. In this work, we modeled the saccade control, taking inspiration from the recurrent loops between the cerebellum and the brainstem. In this model, the brainstem acts as a fixed-inverse model of the oculomotor system, while the cerebellum acts as an adaptive element that learns the internal model of the oculomotor system. The adaptive filter is implemented using a state-of-the-art neural network, called I-SSGPR. The proposed approach, namely recurrent architecture, was validated through experiments performed both in simulation and on an antropomorphic robotic head. Moreover, we compared the recurrent architecture with another model of the cerebellum, the feedback error learning. Achieved results show that the recurrent architecture outperforms the feedback error learning in terms of accuracy and insensitivity to the choice of the feedback controller.

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