Many of the tasks that are potential candidates for automation involve grasping. The authors are interested in the programming of robots to perform grasping tasks. To do this, the assembly plan from observation (APO) paradigm is adopted, where the key idea is to enable a system to observe a human performing a grasping task, understand it, and perform the task with minimal human intervention. A grasping task is composed of three phases; pregrasp phase, static grasp phase, and manipulation phase. The first step in recognizing a grasping task is identifying the grasp itself (within the static grasp phase). The proposed strategy of identifying the grasp is to map the low-level hand configuration to increasingly more abstract grasp descriptions. The abstract grasp descriptions are useful because they are manipulator-independent.