A compact representation of human single-object grasping

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.