The investigation of physiological control systems in general, and the control of standing in particular, have been the subject

of research over an extended period. One topic of debate is whether physiological control mechanisms can be modeled as technological control systems and, if so, what control algorithm is used. In particular, following Fitzpatrick et al. (1996), there has been recurring interest in whether or not predictive mechanisms are required to explain standing balance. The so-called proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control algorithma long-standing process control algorithmwas suggested some time ago (Johansson et al. 1988) and has received a lot of attention recently (Peterka 2002; Maure and Peterka 2005; Alexandrov et al. 2005; Lockhart and Ting 2007; Masani et al. 2006; van der Kooij and de Vlugt 2007;Welch and Ting 2008). Typically, the three gain parameters and time delay of the PID model have been tuned to simulate spontaneous sway Maurer and Peterka (2005)or have been tuned to reproduce the stimulus-response data where the support surface has been pseudorandomly rotated (Peterka 2002) or translated (Alexandrov et al. 2005; Welch and Ting 2008). This simple delayed-feedback model has been shown many times to t the data quite well; and, in the absence of any contradictory evidence, support remains for the idea that that predictive processes are not required to explain standing balance (Alexandrov et al. 2005; Maurer and Peterka 2005; Peterka 2002; van der Kooij and de Vlugt 2007; Welch and Ting 2008). However, two questions lead us to doubt this approach. First, does tting a delayed feedback model lead to reliable estimates of the time-delay? Second, can a nonpredictive controller provide an explanation compatible with the independently estimated time delay? seconds are common in technological systems and also seem to be a plausible model for some physiological control systems. Akey insight, attributed to Smith (1959), is that a predictor, based on an internal system model can eliminate the time-delay from the feedback loop (though not the overall response) thus reducing controller design and performance analysis to the delayfree case. It is plausible that physiological control systems have built in model-based prediction (McRuer 1980; Miall et al. 1993; Wolpert et al. 1998; Bhushan and Shadmehr 1999; Neilson and Neilson 2005; Loram et al. 2006; Gawthrop et al. 2008; Bye and Neilson 2008). Some predictors such as that of Smith (1959) are not applicable to the control of unstable systems such as the human balance system (Marshall 1979). A state-space based approach which does not have that defect and is akin to that of Fuller (1968), Kleinman (1969) and Sage and Melsa (1971) is used here. We do not Systems with a pure input delay of t
d

claim any novelty for this continuous-time state-space predictive approach which has also been applied in an number of situations including in the engineering literature (Kleinman et al. 1970; Baron et al. 1970; Gawthrop 1982) and in the physiological literature (Van Der Kooij et al. 1999; Van Der Kooij et al. 2001). As discussed this context by Gawthrop et al. (2008), feedback control systems can be represented in either state-space or transfer function form. The choice of representation is not a fundamental issue but rather a matter of convenience: either representation can be converted into the other. This paper uses a state-space approach to directly make use of the statespace

predictor formulation of Kleinman (1969) rather than the transfer-function predictor formulation of Smith (1959). In fact some literature in this area uses a state-space formulation (for example, Van Der Kooij et al. 1999; Van Der Kooij et al. 2001) whereas other use a transfer function (in particular a PID control) formulation (for example, Peterka 2002; Maurer and Peterka 2005; Welch and Ting 2008 ). For this reason, the paper explicitly examines the links between the state-space formulation and the transfer function based PID formulation. Similarly, there is a dichotomy between optimal control and other control design methods. Optimal control is often associated with state-space methods (Kwakernaak and Sivan 1972), but can equally well be associated with transfer-function methods (Newton et al. 1957). However, both optimal and non-optimal approaches ultimately lead to the same form of feedback control and, in some circumstances, a feedback control system can be associated with an optimisation criteria (Kalman 1964) even if it was not explicitly designed to be optimal. In this paper, we use a pole-placement approach to controller design because it directly species closed-loop performance. In other words, controller is parameterised in terms of its closed-loop properties rather than its open-loop properties. The competing predictive and non-predictive hypotheses must be tested using experimental data. Given a set of experimental data, two broad classes of approach can be distinguished: a detailed examination of (suitably averaged) small sections of data (Loram and Lakie 2002a), and the more engineering based approach of system identication (Johansson et al. 1988; Peterka 2002). Peterka (2002)usesatwo stage approach to controller estimation: rstly, the transfer function frequency response is estimated and second, a parametric model is tted to the frequency response using nonlinear optimisation. Such a two stage approach has also been suggested and used in the engineering literature (Pintelon and Schoukens 2001; Wang et al. 2004). As this paper is particularly concerned with system time-delays, it is appropriate to replace the rst stage frequency response representation by its time-domain equivalent: the system impulse response. There are many ways to generate an estimated impulse response, including Fourier transforming the frequency response and the Frequency Sampling Filter (Wang and Cluett 1997). The FSF was evaluated in this context Gawthrop and Wang 2008), but the well-established ARMAX identication approach (Ljung 1999) as implemented the Matlab Identication Toolbox was found to be more reliable and is used here; this method also gives a direct estimate of the time-delay via the AIC (Akaike Information Criterion) criterion (Ljung 1999). The second stage then volves tting the impulse response in the time domain in place of the frequency response in the frequency domain. Identication of physiological control systems from

unperturbed measured data has two problems: rst, the controller is embedded in a closed-loop system and second, the need to estimate disturbance models can both lead toambiguity in interpretation of the results. These two pitfalls are avoided here by using an external measured perturbation to the system and by identifying the entire closed-loop dynamics. There are a number of different representations of controllers, including the transfer function representation based on Laplace transforms and the state-space approach based on differential equations. In the context of this paper, it important that the controller corresponding to each hypothesis is represented and implemented within the same control engineering framework thus avoiding apparent differences solely due to implementation artifacts. This paper uses a state-space framework within which non-predicticontrol and predictive control are embedded in a uniform way. The non-predictive controller is equivalent to a form PID controller. Section 2 discusses basic modelling issues and derivthe closed-loop system to be estimated. Section 3 derives the theoretical closed-loop impulse responses corresponding both predictive and non-predictive control. Section 4 looks non-parametric estimation of the closed-loop human impulse response from experimental data. The results of Sect. 3 are used in Sect. 5 to identify parametric models from the impulse responses of Sect. 4. Section 6 concludes the paper.