Dear friends,

Our workshop on understanding the human hand for advancing robotic
manipulation is fast approaching. We will have 10 renowned speakers,
and we have had a terrific response from different research communities
(19 posters in all). We look forward to seeing you at the workshop.
Please see below for details on participation. Thanks!

Ravi

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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
RSS 2009 Workshop (Full Day) on Understanding the Human Hand for Advancing
Robotic Manipulation

Website: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/bravi/rssws/

When:
Sunday, June 28, 2009
8:30 AM to 6 PM

Where:
Electrical Engineering Building, University of Washington
Robotics: Science and Systems Conference
Seattle, WA.
htp://www.roboticsconference.org

Workshop Introduction
Recent advances in the human sciences have energized the field of
robotics toward personal assistants and brain machine interface. There
is an increased interest to solve the robotic manipulation question: Can
we build robotic hands that can accomplish our daily manipulation tasks?
The human hand is adept at many diverse tasks in varied contexts,
including power and precision grasping, twisting, and tapping. But we
still do not know what features of the human hand enable such
capability. For example, do biomechanical features like the complex
tendon-hood, synergistic muscle actuation, and bone shapes make the
difference? Or is it the neural coding of movement? Importantly for
robotics, we need to understand what features should be included in
future robotic hands. This workshop is a forum for researchers to
discuss manipulation viewed in light of the human hand’s features and
hopes to push the state of the art of the robotic hand. We expect that
the workshop will bring together researchers from diverse areas such as
robotics, biomechanics, neuroscience, and anthropologists.

Topics of Interest
Topics addressed include but are NOT LIMITED to:
-- human hand’s biomechanics, such as bones, tendon hood, and muscles
structure and usage.
-- neural control systems, learning, and representation of movement/action.
-- sensory perception and feedback.
-- robotic manipulation and haptics, such as grasping, dexterity
analysis, sensitivity.
-- evolution of the hand across species.
-- human hand behavior/function measurements in different tasks.

Speakers:
Prof. Peter Allen (Columbia University)
Prof. George Bekey (University of Southern California)
Prof. Susan Lederman (Queen's University)
Dr. Lynette Jones (MIT)
Prof. Haruhisa Kawasaki (Gifu University)
Prof. Gerry Loeb (University of Southern California)
Prof. Marco Santello (Arizona State University)
Prof. Veronica Santos (Arizona State University)
Prof. Bruno Siciliano (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II)
Prof. Francisco Valero-Cuevas (University of Southern California)

Workshop Organizers
Ravi Balasubramanian
Post-doctoral Research Associate
University of Washington and Intel Research Seattle

Yoky Matsuoka
Associate Professor
University of Washington

Dillon Eng
Website and Proceedings Production Chair