Evaluation of functional roles of phase resetting in generation of adaptive human bipedal locomotion based on a neuromusculoskeletal model

Simulation studies have been conducted to examine the neuro-control mechanisms during human locomotion and demonstrated that sensory regulations based on phase resetting contribute to improving the robustness. However, their simulations assumed the prescribed joint kinematics and a feedback control, which limited adaptation properties. In this paper, we propose a more physiologically-based model of the nervous system and investigate the functional roles of phase resetting. The simulation results showed that our model establishes adaptive walking against force disturbances and environmental variations, where phase resetting played important roles in increasing the robustness, suggesting that this regulation mechanism might contribute to the generation of adaptive human locomotion.