Will We Soon Have Robots That Can Grasp Objects?

Gabbing things might sound like a piece of cake for a normal grown-up human but this is what robots find challenging. To help them conquer this basic skill set, scientists have conducted a study involving over 5000 samples of how people grasp and pass things with one hand.

By examining these gestures, experts can have a clearer idea of how human place their hand to grab or hand objects. Data of the receiving end is also collected. This study is a joint effort of Valerio Ortenzi (Australian Centre for Robotic Vision) and Francesca Cini (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna).

Their work was published on Science Robotics with more details on the test objects, which range from a pen, a bottle, to a toy.

What happens for a human is a smooth flow of signals and actions to fulfil the task of grabbing or handling objects. According to Ortenzi, handover is thought to be the prime example of how human adjusts a little bit to passing an object successfully.

It seems easy enough for a typical human but attempt to recreate human’s ability on robots is still not fruitful at all. The best scientists have got to is unnatural gestures and failing to grab or handover.

The problem robots are facing is how to pick a suitable grasp. There are several different factors that should be taken into consideration.

The two scientists analyzed more than 5000 grasps of many objects with 34 people pairing up to hand them over for each other.

What participants had to do is to pick an object up, did two more tasks with it and then handed to the other, who did exactly the same tasks.

So far, they have concluded that more than 70% of the participants used the fingertips and finger part to grab objects. What human do is a series of patterns learned by repetition over a long period of time, which proves to be a huge challenge for robots.