The Visual Control of Grasping

人类的手是一件了不起的工程学作品。我们可以精准地伸手抓住物体--远远好于目前研发出的任何机器人。使这成为可能的一件事是我们敏锐的视觉。梅尔·古代尔教授和他在韦斯特大脑与心灵研究所的同事们正在研究视觉信息如何在手伸出手并抓住物体时用于引导它，以前使用工具等物体的经验如何影响抓住物体的方式，与我们互动的其他人的存在如何影响我们的抓住，以及大脑的哪些区域参与了这些不同的情况。为了研究手是如何移动的，古代尔教授使用特殊的红外线敏感相机来跟踪安装在指尖、手和手腕上的微小红外光。然后，这些摄像头的数据可以用来重建抓取运动展开时手和手指的轨迹。

The human hand is a remarkable piece of engineering. We can reach out and grasp objects with exquisite accuracy - far better than any robot yet developed. One of the things that makes this possible is our keen sense of sight. Prof. Mel Goodale and his colleagues at Western’s Brain and Mind Institute are studying how visual information is used in guiding the hand as it reaches out and grasps an object, how previous experience with objects such as tools affects how an object is grasped, how the presence of others with whom we are interacting affects our grasping, and what brain areas are engaged in these different situations. To study how the hand is moving, Prof. Goodale uses special infra-red sensitive cameras to track tiny infra-red lights that have been attached to the fingertips, hand, and wrist. The data from these cameras can then be used to reconstruct the trajectory of the hand and fingers as the grasping movement unfolds.