Generation Human -like Arm Motion to Catch a Moving Object

Robots are required to assist our activities in daily life. In this paper, we focus on arm movement to catch moving object as one of important tasks frequently performed by human. We propose an algorithm which enables a robot to perform human-like arm motion to catch a moving object. First we analyze human hand trajectories and velocity profiles to catch an object. From the experimental results, we extract some characteristics in the process of approaching and following a moving object and confirm that these are necessary to realize human-like motion. We then adopt an instantaneous optimal control method which evaluates the error and energy cost at each sampling step, and design two time-varying weight matrices to introduce human characteristic into robot motion. The matrix concerning the error is defined as a time-increasing ...