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Volume 17, Number 18, Issue of September 15, 1997 pp. 7119-7128
Copyright ©1997 Society for Neuroscience

Obstacle Avoidance and a Perturbation Sensitivity Model for Motor Planning

Received March 4, 1997; revised June 26, 1997; accepted July 1, 1997.

Philip N. Sabes and Michael I. Jordan

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

A novel obstacle avoidance paradigm was used to investigate the planning of human reaching movements. We explored whether the CNS plans arm movements based entirely on the visual space kinematics of the movements, or whether the planning process incorporates specific details of the biomechanical plant to optimize the trajectory plan. Participants reached around an obstacle, the tip of which remained fixed in space throughout the experiment. When the obstacle and the start and target locations were rotated about the tip of the obstacle, the visually specified task constraints retained a rotational symmetry. If movements are planned in visual space, as indicated from a variety of studies on planar point-to-point movements, the resulting trajectories should also be rotationally symmetric across trials. However, systematic variations in movement path were observed as the orientation of the obstacle was changed. These path asymmetries can be accounted for by a class of models in which the planner reduces the likelihood of collision with the obstacle by taking into account the anisotropic sensitivity of the arm to external perturbations or uncertainty in joint level control or proprioception. The model that best matches the experimental results uses planning criteria based on the inertial properties of the arm.

Key words: human psychophysics; visuomotor control; motor planning; reaching; obstacle avoidance; optimal control; theoretical model

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