Modelling human arm motion through the attractor dynamics approach

Movement generation in robotics is an old problem with many excellent solutions. Most of them, however, look for optimality according to some metrics, but have no biological inspiration or cannot be used to imitate biological motion. For a human these techniques behave in a non-naturalistic way. This poses a problem for instance in human-robot interaction and, in general, for a good acceptance of robots in society. The present work presents a new analysis of the attractor dynamics approach to movement generation used in an anthropomorphic robot arm. Our analysis points to the possibility of using this approach to generate human-like arm trajectories in robots. One key property of human trajectories in pick-and-place tasks is the planarity of the trajectory of the end effector in 3D space. We show that this feature is also displayed by the attractor dynamic approach and, therefore, is a good candidate to the generation of naturalistic arm movements.