Engineers have unveiled a robotic hand that is sensitive enough to handle items like crisps and raspberries without damaging them.
The breakthrough marks a major milestone towards creating robots with similar dexterity to humans, holding the potential to usher in a new era of household robots.
Developed by a team at the University of Texas at Austin, the Fragile Object Grasping with Tactile Sensing (FORTE) technology could also transform industries like health care and manufacturing.
“Right now, robotics is starting to be able to do large motions around the house, but struggles with really fine and delicate movements,” said Siqi Shang, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, who led the development of the robot hand.
“Robots can fold a shirt but may struggle to carefully pick up your glasses or unpack fruit from your groceries. We believe sensing signals will give robots a sense of touch to handle these objects carefully.”
The fingers of the robotic hand are inspired by something called the fin-ray effect, with each one featuring internal air channels that act as tactile sensors.
The empty air channels experience a change in pressure as the fingers grasp an object, with this shift detected by sensors that inform the robot how much pressure to use.
The system was tested on 31 different objects, ranging from fragile items, to more sturdy everyday items like jam jars and apples.
In a single-trial grasping experiment, the robotic fingers achieved a 91.9 per cent success rate, and was able to correctly identify a slip event 100 per cent of the time.
This slip-sensing ability is unrivalled in other robotic gripping technologies, according to the UT engineers, with its reaction times also unmatched.
“Humans pick up objects with just the right amount of force; too much and you’ll crush it, but too little and it’ll slip out of your hand,” said Lillian Chin, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UT.
“Most current force sensors aren’t fast or accurate enough to provide that Goldilocks level of detail. In particular, our sensors operate closer to the timescales of human hand sensors.”
The new robot hand was detailed in a paper, titled ‘FORTE: Tactile Force and Slip Sensing on Compliant Fingers for Delicate Manipulation’, published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
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