Academic Awards 2025 booklet

33 Haptic exploration strategies for determining a stable grip of familiar and unfamiliar objects Humans perform everyday actions, like picking up a dropped object or adjusting their grip, effortlessly and subconsciously. Robots, however, struggle with these same tasks because they lack this intuitive understanding. Programming such behavior directly is nearly impossible, which is why we must uncover the hidden human strategies that underlie our actions and translate them into robotic systems. These human-inspired approaches offer powerful, efficient solutions shaped by evolution and are key to making robots more adaptive, reliable, and capableof functioning incomplex,real-worldenvironments. My thesis contributes to this goal by investigating how people determine a stable grip on both familiar and unfamiliar objects using only haptic (touch-based) input to inspire improved robotic strategies when their visual input is unreliable or insufficient. By analyzing people’s hand movements, I identified two distinct human approaches: a brief, efficient strategy for familiar objects, and a more thorough, varied one for unfamiliar ones. Remarkably, participants almost always achieved a stable grip, demonstrating that touch alone can provide sufficient information for stable grasping when vision is unavailable. These findings offer concrete guidance for robotics: by mimicking the adaptive, familiarity-based strategies humans use subconsciously, we can make robotic hands far more effective in uncertain, dynamic environments. My research shows how understanding intuitive human behavior can unlock the next step in developing intelligent, flexible, and truly supportive robotic systems. Table 1: This table shows the main findings of the research, namely the two identified strategies ‘Brief exploration’ and ‘Thorough exploration’ and which hand movements they exist of, so-called exploratory procedures (EPs). The EPs are listed with an illustration and the object properties that they provide information about. Figure 1: The usage of EPs for the brief (top) and thorough (bottom) exploration strategies as observed by analyzing video material of the participants’ hands while interacting with the object before determining a stable grip. On the left side, the average time that each EP in seconds for a) brief exploration and b) thorough exploration is shown. On the right side, the amount of times each distinct EP was used as the first, second or third in the sequence of hand movements during c) brief exploration, and d) thorough exploration.