Generating artificially mastered motions for an upper limb in baseball pitching from several objective functions

It is possible to consider a mastered skill to be an optimal skill under some conditions, especially in the field of sports, We call an ideal skill generated in an artificial environment like a computer, an “artificially mastered skill”. There must exist an objective function which represents the objective of the optimization for the skill. The objective function plays the most important role in defining the meaning of the mastered skill. In this paper, we propose a computer simulation method of generating artificially mastered motions for an upper limb during baseball pitching by using a three-dimensional mathematical model and an optimizing method. We report the consequences of simulation experiments for several objective functions that define the mastered skill in the meaning of “nonwasteful” and/or “smooth”. From the consequences, we also investigate the property of an “artificially mastered skill motion” generated from each objective function, paying attention to differences among the consequent motions for each objective function from the viewpoints of kinematics and dynamics