[…the universe is a book which …] cannot be understood if one does not learn the language and the symbols in which it is written….These are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which means man cannot understand a single word in that book. Without these, it is just wandering in vain in an obscure labyrinth.
Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore, 1623.
The fundamental idea underlying this project is that (rephrasing Galileo) the hand embodied speaks a language whose words are the sensorimotor synergies, and that only the understanding of this language will enable the community to build artificial systems that can have a dialogue with the human counterpart.
The advantages of this will be clear in the three application domains of the project:
- in the specification design, programming and control of robotic hands, where the human “talks” to the artificial system;
- in multi‐cue, whole‐hand haptic interfaces, where the artificial “talks” to the human through sensorimotor interactions;
- in neural control of hand prostheses, where the human efferent and afferent synergy system is most closely communicating with the artificial.
It is the belief of this consortium (motivated by our previous work and encouraging preliminary results) that by studying how the embodied characteristics of the human hand and its sensors, the sensorimotor transformations, and the very constraints they impose, affect and determine the learning and control strategies, a further considerable advance can be made.
The main innovation of THE Hand Embodied concerns the integration of the methodologies and technologies from Neuroscience, Robotics and Haptics in a coherent set of theoretical tools and a methodology for the design
of the next generation of artificial hands and interfaces. In particular, possible innovations based on the outcome of this project will be:
- simpler and more performing system architectures for the “hand” as a cognitive organ;
- robot hands capable of being programmed more simply and to adapt more robustly to different task/environment conditions;
- radically new and improved control architectures for haptic interfaces (at the cutaneous and wholehand level);
- new neuro‐prosthetic devices based on seamless sensorimotor bidirectional information flow.
The challenges of this project require the confluence of multidisciplinary and leading‐edge research efforts that cannot be easily found in national and local dimensions but require an integrated European action. The groups forming the consortium have a well‐established research tradition in the themes addressed within the project, and contribute a unique new approach to a fundamental problem in cognitive robotics, i.e. hands and haptic perception.
