Over the last decades the generation mechanism and the representation of goal- directed movements has been a topic of intensive neurophysiological research. The investigation in the motor, premotor, and parietal areas led to the discovery that the direction of hand’s movement in space was encoded by populations of neurons in these areas together with many other movement parameters. These distributions of population activation reflect how movements are prepared ahead of movement initiation, as revealed by activity induced by cues that precede the imperative signal (Georgopoulos, 1991).
Inspired by those findings a model based on dynamical systems was proposed both, to model goal directed trajectories in humans and to generate trajectories for redundant anthropomorphic robotic arms. The analysis of the attractor dynamics based on the qualitative comparison with measurements of resulting trajectories taken from arm movement experiments with humans (Grimme u. a., 2012) created a framework able to reproduce and to generate naturalistic human like arm trajectories (Iossifidis und Rano, 2013; Iossifidis, Schöner u. a., 2006).
Over the last decades the generation mechanism and the representation of goal- directed movements has been a topic of intensive neurophysiological research. The investigation in the motor, premotor, and parietal areas led to the discovery that the direction of hand’s movement in space was encoded by populations of neurons in these areas together with many other movement parameters. These distributions of population activation reflect how movements are prepared ahead of movement initiation, as revealed by activity induced by cues that precede the imperative signal (Georgopoulos, 1991).