Dr. Sridevi V. Sarma of the Institute for Computational Medicine (ICM) has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation award of $2,000,000 in support of the project entitled “EFRI-M3C: Robust Decoder-Compensator Architecture for Interactive Control of High-Speed and Loaded Movements.” The research involves developing a novel model-based Robust Decoder-Compensator (RDC) architecture for interactive control of fast movements in the presence of uncertainty.
The RDC is a feedback interconnection that decodes cortical signals to produce actuator commands that reflect motor intent, corrects for spurious signals generated by the cerebellum in the absence of proprioceptive feedback, and makes the interconnection to account for mismatches between models and reality more robust. A unique experimental paradigm will be exploited wherein neural spike and local field potential data will be collected from patients with implantable electrodes admitted for epilepsy surgery.
Dr. Sarma’s collaborators on the project are John Thomas Gale, Munther A. Dahleh, and Nitish Thakor. The award is effective September 15, 2011 and expires August 31, 2015.