September 2019
Volume 19, Issue 10
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   September 2019
Grasping complex 3D shapes
Author Affiliations & Notes
  • Zoltan Derzsi
    New York University Abu Dhabi
  • Robert Volcic
    New York University Abu Dhabi
Journal of Vision September 2019, Vol.19, 109d. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/19.10.109d
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      Zoltan Derzsi, Robert Volcic; Grasping complex 3D shapes. Journal of Vision 2019;19(10):109d. https://doi.org/10.1167/19.10.109d.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

Humans tend to effortlessly estimate the center of mass of objects before grasping them. It is known that minimum torque is required when the centroid of the contact points corresponds with or is near to the object’s center of mass. This distance, when compared with respect to the dimensions of the grasped object, is inversely proportional to the quality of the grasping. In our experiment, we measured the distance between the center of mass and the grasping contact point centroid when participants grasped a sphere or three noisy objects. Noisy objects were created by displacing the surface of a sphere (radius = 30 mm) in the radial direction according to fractal Brownian motion noise (radius displacement of up to 20%, with a spatial bandwidth of 2 octaves). These 3D-printed objects were presented at table height, in various orientations. The task of our 18 right-handed adult participants was to use a two-digit precision grip to pick up these objects for a total of 1440 trials. The exact contact points on the object’s surface were obtained by accurately tracking the positions of the fingertips with virtual markers (MOTOM toolbox: Derzsi & Volcic, 2018). We found that the distance between the center of mass and the grasping point centroid was 11.54 (95% C.I.: ±2.05) mm for the sphere, and for the three objects, the distances were 14.03 (95% C.I.: ±1.66), 13.67 (95% C.I.: ±2.08), and 14.15 (95% C.I.: ±1.95) mm, respectively. While we observed that the grasping of the sphere is more precise, we found that there are no differences between how well our participants grasped the noisy objects. We therefore suggest that, in our case, the grasping quality depends on the shape complexity, rather than the shape itself.

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