Systems neuroscience × control theory

Navigation and movement in animals and robots

The LIMBS Lab @ Johns Hopkins sits at the intersection of systems neuroscience and control theory to understand—and engineer—robust navigation and movement. We design closed-loop experimental paradigms and conduct neurophysiological experiments to reveal how neural circuits use sensory feedback to guide behavior and adapt to perturbations. We pair these data with dynamical-systems and feedback-control models: animal locomotion is an analysis problem (reverse-engineering how neural computation and biomechanics generate behavior), while robotics is a design problem (using biological principles to build new sensing and control strategies).

Our research spans multiple model systems and long-standing collaborations, including:

• Rats: spatial navigation in freely moving animals, using immersive virtual-reality and closed-loop perturbations to probe how sensory landmarks and self-motion signals jointly shape hippocampal spatial codes.
  Collaborators: JHU.
• Drosophila (fruit flies): multisensory control and 3D navigation.
  Collaborators: Cornell, Vanderbilt, Case Western, UC Santa Barbara, and Princeton.
• Weakly electric fish: active sensing, closed-loop control, and motor learning.
  Collaborators: NJIT, University of Minnesota, UMBC, and Northeastern.
• Bats: airflow sensing and the neural basis of flight control.
  Collaborators: JHU.
• Cockroaches: tactile sensing and navigation in cluttered environments.
  Collaborators: UC Berkeley.
• Humans: motor coordination in individuals with cerebellar ataxia.
  Collaborators: JHU.

Across projects, we use control theory and dynamical-systems tools to quantify stability, feedback, learning, and adaptation under perturbations—and to link measurable behavior to underlying neural computation. Our work is built around closed-loop perturbation paradigms that connect neural dynamics to behavior and translate biological principles into more capable, adaptive robotic systems.

Affiliation: Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR), Johns Hopkins University.

Noah J. Cowan, Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Joint Appointments: Computer Science,  Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Neuroscience
Whiting School of Engineering
Johns Hopkins University

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