Functional Overview#

MotorNet Classes

Being built in Python, Motornet is an object-oriented toolbox. There are four object classes to consider.

  • Muscle objects.
  • Skeleton objects.
  • Effector objects.
  • Environment objects.

Muscle class

Muscle objects handle muscle dynamics, and muscle state generation.

Skeleton class

Skeleton objects hold skeleton and geometry information, handle skeleton (motion) dynamics, generate joint states. and can convert joint states to cartesian states.

Effector class

Effector objects handle coordination of information flow between Muscle and Skeleton objects. They hold information about how muscles wrap around the skeleton, apply moment arms to forces generated by muscles to compute moment-adjusted (or generalized) forces that will be applied to skeletons. They also perform numerical integration.

Network class

Network objects hold network weights, perform the forward pass, and apply the feedback delays based on feedback properties held by the plant. They can also send a request to the Task object to recompute the target states online. This is useful if one wants the inputs to adjust based on some variable whose value changes over the trial.

Environment class

Environment objects are subclasses of gymnasium's Env class. They wrap around the Effector class and provide a gymnasium-like API, which enables interfacing of MotorNet with gymnasium-compatible pipelines and packages.

The Environment class also holds an observation buffer that enables feedback delays to be implemented. It can apply noise to the action input and the observation output, as well as proprioception- and vision-specific noise if desired.

Class Hierarchy

The classes presented above rely on each other to function correctly. Consequently, they must be declared in a sensible order, so that each instance retains as attribute the instances on which they rely. This leads to a hierarchical class structure, where each instance lives in the computer memory in a nested fashion with other instances. The illustration below displays how this hierarchy is organized.

hierarchy

Representation of the hierarchical relationship between class instances in MotorNet.

Information Flow at Runtime

Computation Steps

The figure below summarizes the operations performed at runtime, as well as what how information flows between class instances.

  • grey1 Receive action input
  • grey2 Pass on actions
  • red1 Pass on actions
  • red2 Return forces
  • red3 Send moment-adjusted (generalized) forces
  • red4 Return new joint & cartesian states
  • red5 Return feedback states
  • grey3 Store states to observation buffer
  • grey4 Return (potentially delayed) observations & instantaneous states

serial

Representation of information flow at runtime in MotorNet.

State Flow

A dedicated tutorial (available here) breaks down how states are generated and how they flow during computation. This is summarized in the illustration below, which is reproduced here for convenience.

states

Representation of the state flow at runtime in MotorNet.