Abstract

This paper presents studies of the coordination of volun-tary human arm movements. A mathematical model is for-mulated which is shown to predict both the qualitative fea-tures and the quantitative details observed experimentally in planar, multijoint arm movements. Coordination is modeled mathematically by defining an objective function, a measure of performance for any possi-ble movement. The unique trajectory which yields the best performance is determined using dynamic optimization the-ory. In the work presented here, the objective function is the square of the magnitude of jerk (rate of change of accelera-tion) of the hand integrated over the entire movement. This is equivalent to assuming that a major goal of motor coordi-nation is the production of the smoothest possible movement