THE INTELLIGENT HAND - AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH TO HUMAN OBJECT RECOGNITION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR ROBOTICS AND AI

The information in this article was originally presented as a keynote invited talk by Susan Lederman at the Thirteenth International Joint C onference on Artificial Intelligence in Chambery, France; it is based primarily on a joint research program that we conducted. We explain ho w the scientific study of biological systems offers a complementary ap proach to the more formal analytic methods favored by roboticists; suc h study is also relevant to a number of classical problems addressed b y the AI field. We offer an example of the scientific approach that is based on a selection of our experiments and empirically driven theore tical work on human haptic (tactual) object processing; the nature and role of active manual exploration is of particular concern. We furthe r suggest how this program with humans can be modified and extended to guide the development of high-level manual exploration strategies for robots equipped with a haptic perceptual system.