Vision and Grasping: Humans vs. Robots

Biomimetic robotics is a rapidly developing field, and the limited literature about biological inspiration in robot grasping at cognitive level suggests that the field has still much to offer. Neuroscience studies indicate that vision-based reaching and grasping are important to the extent that an entire cortical pathway is dedicated to these skills. Nevertheless, recent findings point out the existence of strict relations between action-oriented (dorsal pathway) and categorization-oriented (ventral pathway) vision. In this paper, we will compare present day research on vision-based robotic grasping with the above mentioned neuroscience findings. Then, we propose a new approach to vision for grasping in robotics, which aims at improving the emulation of human skills through the integration of the information flows proceeding from the two visual pathways.

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