Manual intelligence and embodiment

Our hands belong to our most remarkable interfaces: they are the basis for getting "into touch with the world" and mastering the developmental steps that range from initial contact to skillful physical control of a huge variety of objects. This involves a rich shaping of physical contacts to enable active sensing, haptic recognition, purposeful manipulation, and ultimately emotional expression through gesture and physical contact. Most of these skills are very strongly shaped by the embodiment of our hand-arm-eye system and the pervading role of touch sensing for the control of physical contact patterns.

A deeper understanding of the "manual intelligence" manifested in these capabilities is likely to require the integration of insights from many disciplines. The present talk will provide a perspective biased from robotics and approach manual intelligence from the side of its technical synthesis: what does it require to replicate parts of manual intelligence on anthropomorphic robot hands, what insights can we gain from such attempts, and what are useful cross-connections with disciplines that range from physics and mathematics to brain science? Embodiment will be an overarching aspect, and we will take the view that manual intelligence is the exploitation of the interactional possibilities that arise from the encounter of two different embodiments: that of the hand-arm system, and that of the to-be-handled part of our environment. We will present a range of examples starting from simplified rigid-body situations and leading upward to manual skills involving the control even of non-rigid objects, such as the folding of paper. We will conclude with some challenges for future research.