The role of vision in two-arms manipulation

The role of vision in two-arm manipulation is investigated in order to suggest a qualitative approach for the solution of coordinated manipulative actions. The visuomotor behavior proposed, although partially supported by experimental results, differs from more geometrical approaches based on explicit 4D measures and trajectory estimation in that it is based on direct visual information, such as stereo disparity or the 2D image motion field. The experiment is limited to analysis of the optical flow information extracted from manipulative actions performed by a human operator. These experiments demonstrate that the qualitative approach proposed is not in contrast with human behavior and that the two-arm manipulation task proposed can be seen as a testbed for qualitative and geometrical approaches