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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: RSS Workshop on Understanding Human Hand for Advancing Robotic Manipulation

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).  Please see below for details on participation.

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