Intermittent appearances of saddle-type hyperbolic dynamics during human stick balancing on a manually controlled cart

Stabilization of an inverted pendulum on a manually controlled cart (cart-inverted pendulum; CIP), analogous to human fingertip stick balancing, is considered to get insights of how the human central nervous system stabilizes unstable dynamics. We explore a possibility that a type of intermittent control strategy proposed for human postural control might also be applicable to the CIP task, i.e., whether a transient contracting dynamics along a stable manifold of a saddle-type equilibrium of the non-controlled inverted pendulum is exploited intermittently. To this end, we measured task performances during CIP balancing from several experimental subjects. Intermittent appearances of hyperbolicity as typical characteristics reflecting the intermittent control strategy were examined in the recorded motion data using phase space analysis and wavelet analysis. We show that skilled subjects tend to exhibit those characteristics, suggesting that they stabilize upright posture of the stick by utilizing the intermittent control strategy.