Investigation of Hierarchical Architecture of Human Guidance Behavior for Skill Analysis

This paper builds on a concept in our previous work that humans achieve efficient organization of guidance behavior by employing a hierarchical architecture that unifies planning, perceptual guidance and motor control. Human guidance behavior can be described as a motion planning problem subject to agent-environment constraints and constraints imposed by human biophysical limitations. This paper presents a mathematical formulation of the hierarchical architecture that decomposes the global problem into multiple levels of lower dimension local optimization problems. A simulation model implementing the hierarchical architecture is conducted as a validation of the framework and a platform to interpret human guidance behavior. This simulation model also provides insights into skill development and skill assessment.