  The Minimum Jerk motion model has long been cited in literature for human
point-to-point reaching motions in single-person tasks. While it has been
demonstrated that applying minimum-jerk-like trajectories to robot reaching
motions in the joint action task of human-robot handovers allows a robot giver
to be perceived as more careful, safe, and skilled, it has not been verified
whether human reaching motions in handovers follow the Minimum Jerk model. To
experimentally test and verify motion models for human reaches in handovers, we
examined human reaching motions in unconstrained handovers (where the person is
allowed to move their whole body) and fitted against 1) the Minimum Jerk model,
2) its variation, the Decoupled Minimum Jerk model, and 3) the recently
proposed Elliptical (Conic) model. Results showed that Conic model fits
unconstrained human handover reaching motions best. Furthermore, we discovered
that unlike constrained, single-person reaching motions, which have been found
to be elliptical, there is a split between elliptical and hyperbolic conic
types. We expect our results will help guide generation of more humanlike
reaching motions for human-robot handover tasks.
