“Harnessing Human Manipulation” is a project to explore manipulation by studying human manipulation and transferring human manipulation skills to robots.

Robotic manipulation research frequently draws on human manipulation for inspiration, but in the past our appreciation of human manipulation was primarily anecdotal and introspective. Our goal is a deeper, more principled understanding of human manipulation.

One approach is to use citizen scientists, a crowd of research assistants, to analyze the vast corpus of human manipulation available on the internet. Our preliminary experiments show (1) that effective use of a crowd depends on a well-constructed structure or language for expressing observations; and (2) that existing systems for classifying human manipulation are not sufficient.