Francisco Valero-Cuevas

University of Southern Calforinia

Human Hands

Francisco has studied the human grasping system from various perspectives, including the study of cadaver hands to extract models of the tendon-driven actuation. He also has examined the neural evidence for actuation strategies.

Aaron Dollar

Yale University

Robotic Hands

Aaron's SDM hand, in our view, marks a change in direction of how hands are built. The SDM hand is very simple, yet highly effective. It lets the hardware do the "thinking." He also built several hands as part of the DARPA ARM project.

Marco Santello

Arizona State University

Human Grasping

Marco is THE pioneer in the field of grasp synergies. His work in human grasping is not only influential in his own field, but has - dare we say the word - caused a paradigm shift in robotic grasping. More generally, he investigates the mechanisms underlying sensorimotor integration in motor learning and control.

Oliver Brock

TU Berlin

Robotic Grasping

 The original invited speaker was Antonio Bicchi. Unfortunately, due to a scheduling conflict, Antonio cannot attend RSS. Oliver will therefore present a talk he co-authored together with Antonio Bicchi.

Michael Arbib

University of Southern California

Human Perception

Yes, the real Michael Arbib, no kidding! His research focuses on the coordination of percption and action. He has made seminal contributions to neural networks, discovered mirror neurons, did pioneering work on affordance that greatly influenced the use of this concept in robotics, just to name a few things. So, together with Marco Santello, we may have united in this workshop the two neuroscientists with the biggest impact on robotics.

Justus Piater

University of Innsbruck

Robotic Perception

A computer vision person by training, Justus soon focused on perception for interaction. He has come up with some of the most interesting, oftentimes machine-larning-based methods for peception in the context of grasping and interaction.