interests are in the elds of robotics and machine learning, including dextrous manipulation, teleoperation, autonomous mobile robots and adaptive robot behavior. LEARNING DEXTROUS MANIPULATION SKILLS 15 Heuristics derived form observations made on human hands were used to reduce the degrees of freedom of dextrous manipulation with robotic hands. This signiicantly simpliied the task and made aut...

OBJECTIVE Cross-transfer effects were investigated during an occupationally embedded task that involved learning a fine motor skill. Cross-transfer is a phenomenon that occurs when an untrained limb receives some of the same benefits in performance from unilateral training that the contralateral limb received. It was hypothesized that cross-transfer would occur after a unilateral training regim...

Access to the laboratory component of a class is limited by resources, while lab training is not currently possible for distance learning. To overcome the problem a solution is proposed to enable hands-on, interactive, objectively scored and appropriately mentored learning in a widely accessible environment. The proposed solution is the Virtual-Reality Motor-Skills trainer to teach basic fine-m...

OBJECTIVE The use of the telephone for providing healthcare is growing. The aim of this exploratory study was to describe tele-health lessons and strategies as discussed by specialists who provide information and recommendations on poison control hotlines. METHODS Three focus groups of 25 participants who work as specialists in poison information in poison control centers were conducted. Grou...

Bimanual coordination, a prototype of a complex motor skill, has recently become the subject of intensive investigation. Whereas past research focused mainly on the identification of the elementary coordination constraints that limit performance, the focus is now shifting towards overcoming these coordination constraints by means of task symbolization or perceptual transformation rules that pro...

Visual feedback in general, and from the body in particular, is known to influence the performance of motor skills in humans. However, it is unclear how the acquisition of motor skills depends on specific visual feedback parameters such as the size of performing effector. Here, 21 healthy subjects physically trained to perform sequences of finger movements with their right hand. Through the use...

OBJECTIVE Humans can acquire a wide variety of motor skills using sensory feedback pertaining to discrepancies between intended and actual movements. Acupuncture needle manipulation involves sophisticated hand movements and represents a fundamental skill for acupuncturists. We investigated whether untrained students could improve their motor performance during acupuncture needle manipulation us...

Tactile sensing is a fundamental component of object manipulation and tool handling skills. With robots entering unstructured environments, tactile feedback also becomes an important ability for robot manipulation and use of tools. In this work, we explore how a robot can learn to use tactile sensing in object manipulation tasks. We first address the problem of in-hand object localization and a...

We address the problem of executing tool-using manipulation skills in scenarios where the objects to be used may vary. We assume that point clouds of the tool and target object can be obtained, but no interpretation or further knowledge about these objects is provided. The system must interpret the point clouds and decide how to use the tool to complete a manipulation task with a target object;...