A Framework for Visually guided Haptic Exploration with Five Finger Hands

In order for humanoid robots to enter humancentered environments, it is indispensable to equip them with the ability to recognize and classify objects in such an environment. A promising way to acquire the object models necessary for object manipulation appears in the supplement of the information gathered by computer vision techniques with data from haptic exploration. In this paper we present a framework for haptic exploration which can be used for both visually guided exploration with a five-fingered humanoid robot hand as well as with a human hand. We present experiments and results on 2D contour following and haptic exploration of 3D objects by the human hand. Volumetric shape data is acquired by a human operator hand using a data glove. The exploring human hand is located by a stereo camera system, whereas the finger configuration is calculated from the glove data.