Re: [HBRobotics] cpg walking

[Brian Higgins]

Human navigation is a subconscious skill.

Brian Higgins

VA Researcher for blind mobility “Laser enhanced Echolocation” ClearPath Navigation 

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 9, 2025, at 6:40 PM, A J <aj48...@gmail.com> wrote:



We probably walk and talk all of the time, and the brain seems to be

focusing on the conversation without thinking about walking. 

https://intleo.csu.edu.cn/codes/CPGNN.pdf

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[Karim Virani]

Lol. So is human speech, much of the time...

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[Dave Everett]

It usually starts consciously. Think back if you learnt to drive in a manual, jerky as all hell. Over time the operations become subconscious and everything gets smooth.

Talking to F1 drivers, they do not have time to consciously think, same for jet fighter pilots. Your initial learning is conscious after that it's subconscious.

This helps explain my inappropriate jokes in mixed company.

Dave

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[Stephen Williams]

I taught several teenagers to drive: There are a number of things that can be hard to master which probably no one remembers learning.  As an adult: I took flying lessons to get my pilot's license.  I learned to inline skate on the street, sort of snowboard, ocean kayaking, scuba dive + control breathing, SUP, and a number of other things that required learning balance, technique, feels for things.  Then I co-founded an edtech startup, researched & thought about knowledge & learning for several years to digest all of that.

With flying, I had this explicit feeling of teaching part of my brain to feel & react without much thought to reach my moment to moment goals.  Initially, you try to think through how to control things & why, but you can't keep up.  Eventually, the plane becomes an extension of your body so that the various control changes needed are at least semi-automatic.  It is very easy to think of the control loop as being a trained NN.  You can explicitly participate at any time, but when you get busy with other things, you just forget about flying details most of the time.  There are five standard flying tasks you must do at all times, or at least every few seconds during The Scan: You have to reach a degree of subconscious control / muscle memory to be competent & safe.

sdw

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Stephen D. Williams Founder: VolksDroid, Blue Scholar Foundation 650-450-8649 | fax:703-995-0407 | s...@lg.net | https://VolksDroid.org | https://BlueScholar.org | https://sdw.st/in

[Chris Albertson]

“CPG” is a very basic thing we inherited from worms and maybe from even more primitive animals.      This is 100% certain.  But I have a theory that CPG also forms and basis for conscious, self-awareness in animals and people.   

A CPG is just a ring of neurons that, when one fires, then the next and the next, and it goes in a circle forever.    The worm moves because  the odd neurons in the CPG connect to the left-side muscels and the even  ones to the right side.   When the GPG runs the worm makes sinusoidal, s-shape motions and moves forward.  The next step is to connect food-detection patches on the skin that control the speed the odd or even cells in the ring.  Then the worm craws in the direction of the food.   Some animals are simple enough that we have mapped every neuron and know how they are wired. and it is not much more complex than the above.    Thing of the CPG is a distributer on an old V8 engine.  It runs in circles and has eight taps with wires going off to spark plugs, half the wires go to the left side, the others to the right.

Humans use a more complex version to walk and breath breathe.  I think the heart uses something similar, not quite the same.

The software I wrote for my dog-bot uses this same idea.  I have a loop that runs once each step, to walk faster, the loop runs faster.  Input to the loop are parametrs that describe the step, for example the fraction of time the foot is in the air vs on the ground , the length of the stride, and other things like the wifth of the feet and the height of the hips to be maintained above the floor and if there is any lean fore/aft or left/right and the turning rate.     The loop variable is “phase”, always at 0.0 the left foot strikes the ground and at 180 the other foot hits and the loop keeps incrementing the phase.   

If you think in terms of a cyclic pattern, the basic walk motion is easy.    Stability comes next, and this is harder.

About conscious, self-awareness.  My theory is that evolution co-opted the CPG for use as a short-term memory.   If you put a symbol on a loop it runs around forever.  We see these as “brain waves”. out current state of being is in these loops

The other way to think of a CPG in robots is as a “camshaft”. the cam controls the legs, but the shape of the cam and how fast it turns is controllable in real time.

We are not some much different from worms in that we both don’t have tho think about generating a sequence of muscle contractions, we only need to think about controlling speed and direction which are the inputs the CPG.

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