Preparatory object rotation as a human-inspired grasping strategy

Humans exhibit a rich set of manipulation strategies that may be desirable to mimic in humanoid robots. This study investigates preparatory object rotation as a manipulation strategy for grasping objects from different presented orientations. First, we examine how humans use preparatory rotation as a grasping strategy for lifting heavy objects with handles. We used motion capture to record human manipulation examples of 1 participants grasping objects under different task constraints. When sliding contact of the object on the surface was permitted, participants used preparatory rotation to first adjust the object handle to a desired orientation before grasping to lift the object from the surface. Analysis of the human examples suggests that humans may use preparatory object rotation in order to reuse a particular type of grasp in a specific capture region or to decrease the joint torques required to maintain the lifting pose. Second, we designed a preparatory rotation strategy for an anthropomorphic robot manipulator as a method of extending the capture region of a specific grasp prototype. The strategy was implemented as a sequence of two open-loop actions mimicking the human motion: a preparatory rotation action followed by a grasping action. The grasping action alone can only successfully lift the object from a 45-degree region of initial orientations (4 of 24 tested conditions). Our empirical evaluation of the robot preparatory rotation shows that even using a simple open-loop rotation action enables the reuse of the grasping action for a 360-degree capture region of initial object orientations (24 of 24 tested conditions).