Segmenting manipulative hand movements by dividing phase plane trajectories

Abstract

Understanding manipulative hand movements is a critical step toward automatic programming of dexterous robot hands, which, given their large number of degrees of freedom, are difficult to program. Our working hypothesis is that the units of manipulative hand movements are coordinated patterns of movement, and that most of the stable patterns of coordination are either in-phase (zero relative phase) or anti-phase (half-a-cycle relative phase). The phase-plane trajectories projected by these patterns of coordination are straight lines, with either positive or negative slope, respectively. In this paper we develop and demonstrate a method for segmenting the phase-plane trajectories, and thereby the movement, accordingly.