A Study on Optimality Criteria for Two-hand Reaching Tasks

Investigations of one hand reaching tasks suggest that humans use some optimal criterion to select the trajectory for the motion. In this paper, the minimum jerk model that was proposed to account for single-hand reaching tasks is extended to the two-arm case. A set of experiments was performed to verify the model. The repeatability of the experimental results was investigated. The data shows two important characteristics of the trajectories: the connguration dependence, and the independence of the translational and the rotational components of motion. These results suggest that the two-arm minimum jerk model, unless further modiied, cannot account for all of the kinematic properties of the measured trajectories.