Objectives

1. Theory of Grasp Modelling - We will study the requirements and effects of the agent's embodiment on the situatedness, awareness, task and environment understanding and thus provide the means for adaptation and self-reasoning. Learning from human grasping examples will be used to predict and derive which part(s) of the space of all possible grasps can be realised with a specific artificial hand configuration. 
2. Self- and Context-Awareness - We will investigate how an agent benefits from using tutor based and autonomous exploration together with physical modelling of the world to learn more about the possibilities and constraints offered by its embodiment. This will lead to ontology and new representations in the area of systems integration where we consider sensors, embodiment and the environment including other agents allowing for faster knowledge inference based on existing and new competences.  
3. Curiosity and Surprise Driven Behaviour - We will show how the detection of an unexpected event or action is exploited to efficiently add new values, categories or dimensions to the grasping ontology while at the same time exploiting surprise to bootstrap the learning process. Expectations are derived from the prediction of agent behaviour using the experiences gained from self-awareness or introspection.
4. Inferring new Grasping Strategies - We will use the ontology and acquired general knowledge to generate expectations for grasping and manipulation tasks as means of correction between the predicted and the actual state. This will allow adaptation to new objects and situations without the need for extensive re-programming.
5. Exploitation to Future Prosthesis, Industrial and Service Markets - Finally, we set out to exploit the theoretical findings by investigating the grasp mapping to different artificial hands. The objective is to learn how kinematical design and the number of DOFs influence dexterity and how to optimize the graspable sub-set of all possible grasps while minimising DOFs. This shall ultimately lead to efficient hand designs that are suitable for low cost production to aid as many handicapped persons as possible. It shall also influence future manufacturing of robotic hands useful to industrial as well as service-oriented enterprises.