Projects

Essential Tremor (ET) is a widespread neurological condition that is characterised by involuntary shaking that primarily affects the hands but it also extends to also impact visual stability. These tremors pass often unnoticed in their subtler forms, and they become recognisable as ET only when they manifest prominently. ET presents distinct challenges in motor control and visual coordination, especially in older individuals but note however that it should not be confused with Parkinson’s disease. Whilst the precise cause of ET remains elusive, there is a growing research that indicates a significant role played by the inferior olive (IO) and more specifically its rhythmic neural activity. As an integral part of the cerebellar system, this IO’s rhythmic neural activity that ultimately coordinates the cerebellar motor signals that drive motor coordination is relevant to understanding the ET is suggested as a potential driver for ET.

The MUSCLEBOT project is a national Spanish project funded by the Spanish National Research Agency MUSCLEBOT(CNS2022-135243) funded by “MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033” and by the European Union “NextGenerationEU/PRTR”. MUSCLEBOT tries to benefit from decades of neuroscience studies about the spino-cerebellar structure and functioning, and apply those findings to the current HRI robotic challenge. Here we address this challenge by adding a muscle model to cobot equipped with series elastic actuators, i.e., Baxter, Sawyer or Panda cobots, and performing spino-cerebellar control able to learn different stiffness profiles which ultimately will improve HRI.

The DLROB project is a national Spanish project funded by the Spanish National Research Agency DLROB (TED2021-630 131294B-I00) funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR.This project focuses on proposing a cobot dynamic modelling methodology and subsequent cobot control that are to be learnt rather than calculated, i.e., data-driven vs. equation-driven modelling and control.

The SPIKEAGE project is a national Spanish project funded by the Spanish National Research Agency SPIKEAGE(MICINN-PID2020-113422G A-I00) ref (MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033). This project studies ageing in the cerebellum by following a multidisciplinary holistic approach.

Esta investigación ha sido financiada con cargo a la ayuda MICINN-FEDER-PID2019-109991GB-I00 concedida por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.

Esta investigación ha sido financiada con cargo a la ayuda P18- FR-2378 concedida por la Consejería de Universidad, Investigación e Innovación de la Junta de Andalucía y por FEDER, Una manera de Hacer Europa.

The HBP is a European flagship initiative aiming to build a research infrastructure to help advance neuroscience, medicine and computing based on brain computational modelling. Our group is included as part of the Neurorobotics Subproject (SP10).

The NEURSEQBOT project is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions founded by the European Commission (MSCA-IF-2019 891774). This multidisciplinary project studies in mice, reproduces with computational models, and applies in neurorobotics experiments how recurrent projections in the cerebellum can help with motor sequence learning.

Perceiving and understanding the environment and being able to efficiently interact with it dynamically is critical for next generation of robots. The human brain is capable of processing and integrating a masive amount of hetereogeneous sensory data, both from external sources (sensory system) as from internal sources (as feedback from previously stored internal representations). Thus, the human brain is a very good reference that performs closed-loop perception-action processing tasks intensively through a highly specialized neuronal structure.

CEREBSENSING is a H2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action (IF) aiming to understand how the cerebellum processes sensorial information coming from the cerebral cortex by using computational models embedded in realistic perception-action simulations.