motorcontrol

Motor control refers to the processes that regulate movement in biological systems and, in engineering, the techniques used to move and position machines. In biology, motor control describes how the nervous system plans, coordinates, and executes movements, integrating sensory information and prior experience into motor commands. Movement results from interactions among brain networks, spinal circuits, muscles, and the environment. Key brain areas include the motor cortex for voluntary initiation, the cerebellum for timing and error correction, and the basal ganglia for action selection and sequencing. Descending pathways such as the corticospinal tract convey commands to spinal motor neurons, while proprioceptive and visual feedback are used to adjust ongoing actions. Motor learning involves adapting commands through practice, often via internal models that predict sensory consequences of actions. Disorders of motor control can impair accuracy or speed, as seen in Parkinson's disease, stroke, or cerebral palsy, while healthy systems exhibit versatility across tasks and contexts.

In engineering and robotics, motor control encompasses algorithms, hardware, and architectures that move actuators to achieve desired states. Control strategies include feedback control, feedforward control, impedance or admittance control, and robust or adaptive methods. Systems comprise actuators, sensors, controllers, and planners, with state estimation performed by techniques such as Kalman filtering. Applications span industrial automation, autonomous vehicles, prosthetics, and humanoid robots. Research seeks to model biological motor control to improve human machine interaction and to develop more capable, reliable machines.