The aim of this experiment was to explore the behavioral effects of various temporal pressures on the anticipatory postural adjustments (APAs) in a complex task. Eighteen handball players performed a handball direct throw in three conditions of temporal pressure: (1) a reactive condition (RC), the throw was initiated as quickly as possible following a visual stimulus; (2) an anticipation-coinci...

Previous studies on overarm throwing have suggested that throwing accuracy depends on a precise central timing mechanism. In the present study, we investigated an alternative hypothesis: that central control of finger opening is based on an internal positional representation of handpath. Angular positions of each segment of the middle finger, thumb, and arm were recorded with the search-coil te...

This thesis considers the control of clutches on the Double Pendulum Robot which allows the introduction of passivity into actuated joints. Considering the task of throwing using minimum energy, the goal is to throw a ball to a minimum desired distance. As this problem involves active and passive actuation, as well as inherent discontinuities due to the clutches, the control problem becomes dif...

This study investigated how the human CNS organizes complex three-dimensional (3D) ball-throwing movements that require both speed and accuracy. Skilled baseball players threw a baseball to a target at three different speeds. Kinematic analysis revealed that the fingertip speed at ball release was mainly produced by trunk leftward rotation, shoulder internal rotation, elbow extension, and wrist...

Catching a ball requires that information be available close to the catch but early enough for prospective or corrective control. In the present experiment, 6 participants were asked to throw and catch a ball continuously for 1 min while wearing liquid-crystal goggles that restricted viewing to specific amounts of time at specific intervals. Participants were free to select the information by v...

Russell L. Smith Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, New Zealand. E-Mail: [email protected] Abstract|This paper describes a novel trainable controller which extends the feedback-error paradigm of Kawato, called an adaptive trajectory generator. The controller can be adapted so that a controlled system shows a behavior which is sp...

A sequence of real numbers an converges to a limit a if and only if, for each 2 > 0, the sequence an eventually lies within a ball of radius 2 centered at a. It’s okay if the first few (or few million) terms lie outside that ball— and the number of terms that do lie outside the ball may depend on how big 2 is (if 2 is small enough it will take millions of terms before the remaining sequence lie...