Reach and grasp movements are a fundamental part of our daily interactions with the environment. This spatially-guided behavior is often directed to memorized objects because of intervening eye movements that caused them to disappear from sight. How does the brain store and maintain the spatial representations of objects for future reach and grasp movements? We had subjects (n=8) make reach and...

The mammalian Golgi reassembly stacking protein (GRASP) proteins are Golgi-localized homotypic membrane tethers that organize Golgi stacks into a long, contiguous ribbon-like structure. It is unknown how GRASPs undergo trans pairing given that cis interactions between the proteins in the plane of the membrane are intrinsically favored. To test the hypothesis that myristoylation of the self-inte...

A previous report described a computer program called GRASP which performs qualitative graphical reasoning by means of cartesian coordinate sketch graphs. This report extends the ideas advanced, and gives more details on the workings of the implemented program. An application program called QED is also described. QED interrogates a database to find items of data which match or nearly match the ...

We develop a geometric framework for the stability analysis of multifingered grasps and propose a measure of grasp stability for arbitrary perturbations and loading conditions. The measure requires a choice of metric on the group of rigid body displacements. We show that although the stability of a grasp itself does not depend on the choice of metric, comparison of the stability of different gr...

There have been many researches on object grasping in cooperating systems assuming no object slippage and stable grasp and the control system is designed to keep the contact force inside the friction cone to prevent the slippage. However undesired slippage can occur due to environmental conditions and many other reasons. In this research, dynamic analysis and control synthesis of a cooperating ...

Many theories have been put forward to explain the origins of right-handedness in humans. Here we present evidence that this preference may stem in part from a right hand advantage in grasping for feeding. Thirteen participants were asked to reach-to-grasp food items of 3 different sizes: SMALL (Cheerios®), MEDIUM (Froot Loops®), and LARGE (Oatmeal Squares®). Participants used both their right-...

Robotic systems have yet to match humans in skill for movement planning and tool manipulation. For example, humans can robustly grasp and manipulate objects even under task variation. However, successful grasping methods for robotic manipulators are often limited to structured environmental conditions. Our dual goals are to understand manipulation actions in humans and to add such skills to a r...