Much remains unknown about how considerations such as stability and energy minimization shape the way humans walk. While active neuromotor control keeps humans upright, they also need to choose from multiple stepping regulation strategies to achieve one or more task goals, such as maintaining a desired speed or direction. Experiments on human treadmill walking motivate an important question: why do humans prefer one task-level regulation strategy over another—perhaps to enhance their ability to reject large disturbances? Here, we study the relationship between task-level regulation and global stability in a powered compass walker on a treadmill, with added step-to-step speed and position regulators. For treadmill walking, we find that speed regulation greatly enlarges and regularizes the unregulated walker’s stability region, i.e. its basin of attraction, much more than position regulation. Thus, our results suggest a possible explanation for the experimental finding that humans strongly prioritize regulating speed from one stride to the next, even as they walk economically on average. Furthermore, our work suggests a functional connection between task-level motor regulation and global stability—and, thus, perhaps even fall risk.

中文翻译：

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任务级调节增强最简单动态步行器的全局稳定性

关于稳定性和能量最小化等考虑因素如何影响人类行走方式，仍有很多未知数。虽然主动神经运动控制使人类保持直立，但他们还需要从多种步进调节策略中进行选择，以实现一个或多个任务目标，例如保持所需的速度或方向。人类跑步机行走的实验激发了一个重要的问题：为什么人类更喜欢一种任务级调节策略而不是另一种——也许是为了增强他们拒绝大干扰的能力？在这里，我们研究了跑步机上电动罗盘步行器的任务级调节与全局稳定性之间的关系，并增加了步进速度和位置调节器。对于跑步机行走，我们发现速度调节极大地扩大和规范了未调节的步行者的稳定区域，即 它的吸引力盆地，远不止位置调节。因此，我们的结果为实验发现提供了一种可能的解释，即人类强烈优先考虑从一个步到另一个步的调节速度，即使他们平均行走经济。此外，我们的工作表明任务级运动调节与全局稳定性之间存在功能联系，因此甚至可能有跌倒风险。