Similarities and varieties in human motion trajectories of predefined grasping and disposing movements

Human movement is characterized by smoothed trajectories and individual solutions relating to joint angle configuration. For the transformation of human movement characteristics into humanoid robots knowledge about basic strategies and the nature of human motion is necessary. The objective of this study is the inter-individual and intra-individual comparison of movement trajectories and time series of joint angles for several predefined object manipulations. For that purpose the kinematics of arm, hand and finger motion was measured via 3D video motion capturing and analyzed. Graphs of object trajectories, joint angles and finger tip distances (grasp state) were displayed for an example motion: moving to a cuboid, grasping the object and putting it to a heightened target position. The varieties in motion of different subjects and within repeated motion cycles of one and the same subject are presented. Besides this we show, how test subjects with different body height solve the motion task.