Observations of human grasping reveal that the exploitation of environmental constraints is a key structural aspect for the robustness and versatility of human grasping behavior. We analyze 3,400 human grasping trials with 17 subjects grasping 25 objects to show that viewing environmental constraints as the central structural aspect of human grasping yields surprisingly simple representations of human grasping behavior. We present hypothesis-driven experiments that emphasize the centrality of environmental constraints in human grasping and extract from data a simple “grasping plan” that is a generative model for all of the human grasping trials we observed. This grasping plan can in principle be transferred to a robot system in an attempt to leverage environmental constraints to improve the performance of robotic grasping.

As a first step towards transferring human grasping capabilities to robots, we analyzed the grasping behavior of human subjects. We derived a taxonomy in order to adequately represent the observed strategies. During the analysis of the recorded data, this classification scheme helped us to obtain a better understanding of human grasping behavior. We will provide support for our hypothesis that humans exploit compliant contact between the hand and the environment to compensate for uncertainty. We will also show a realization of the resulting grasping strategies on a real robot. It is our belief that the detailed analysis of human grasping behavior will ultimately lead to significant increases in robot manipulation and dexterity.