V EGETARIANISM is an old and respectable doctrine, and its popularity seems to be growing.' This would be of little interest to moral philosophers except for one fact, namely that some people advocate vegetarianism on moral grounds. Indeed, two well-known moral and social philosophers, Robert Nozick and Peter Singer, have recently advocated not eating meat on moral grounds.2 One job of a moral ...

This paper introduces a principle to guide the design of finger form: invariance of contact geometry over some continuum of varying shape and/or pose of the grasped object in the plane. Specific applications of this principle include scaleinvariant and pose-invariant grasps. Under specific conditions, the principle gives rise to spiral shaped fingers, including logarithmic spirals and straight ...

We address the issue of learning and representing object grasp a ordance models. Wemodel grasp a ordances with continuous probability density functions (grasp densities) which link object-relative grasp poses to their success probability. The underlying function representation is nonparametric and relies on kernel density estimation to provide a continuous model. Grasp densities are learned and...

Three groups of nondysfunctional adults were observed for atypical pencil grasps (i.e., nondynamic tripod grasps) used during functional writing situations: 58 occupational therapy students signing out equipment, 314 voters signing for their ballots, and 113 medical students taking a written examination. Among the total right-handed population, the most frequently used grasp was the dynamic tri...

Usually, grasp planning can be split up into two phases: In the first phase one tries to find a set of contacts that allow for stable grasping of an object. This phase has been of major research interest, which is also reflected in the (reasonable) definition of a grasp as a set of contact points. In the second phase a feasible hand pose that realizes the grasp with a given hand is calculated. ...