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. 2021 Jun 23;11:13140. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-91714-1

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Three ways to control bipedal walking. (A) The central pattern generator (CPG) comprises neural oscillators that can produce rhythmic motor commands, even in the absence of sensory feedback. Rhythm can be produced by mutually inhibiting neural half-center oscillators (shaded circles). (B) In normal animal locomotion, the CPG is thought to combine an intrinsic rhythm with sensory feedback, so that the periphery can influence the motor rhythm. (C) In principle, sensory feedback can also control and stabilize locomotion through reflexes, without need for neural oscillators. The extreme of (A) CPG control without feedback is referred to here as pure feedforward control, and the opposite extreme (C) with no oscillators as pure feedback control. Any of these schemes could potentially produce the same nominal locomotion pattern, but some (B) combination of feedforward and feedback appears advantageous.