University of Bristol makes 'breakthrough' in tactile robotic hand

19 minutes ago

Maisie Lillywhite, BBC News, West of England

University of Bristol

University of Bristol develops tactile robot hand that can rotate objects

University researchers say they have made “significant progress” in developing a tactile robotic hand.

Led by Professor Nathan Lepola, professor of robotics and AI at the University of Bristol, the team developed a four-fingered robotic hand that can rotate balls and toys in any direction and orientation.

Increased dexterity could have a major impact on automating tasks such as handling items in supermarkets or sorting waste for recycling.

The next step with this technology would be to move on to more advanced examples of dexterity, such as assembling Lego-like items by hand.

OpenAI became the first company to demonstrate human-like dexterity with a robotic hand in 2019, but soon disbanded its robotics team.

The device included a cage equipped with 19 cameras and more than 6,000 central processing units (CPUs) to train a giant neural network that could control the hand.

Professor Lepola wanted to see if similar results could be achieved in a more cost-effective way.

Four teams from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University in New York and Bristol have achieved the feat of dexterity in their robotic hands using a “simple setup” and desktop computers.

Science Robotics

The team built a sense of touch into the robotic hand.

Advances in smartphone cameras have made it possible to develop high-resolution tactile sensors by making them small enough to fit comfortably on a robot's fingertip.

Professor Lepola said the team mimicked the internal structure of human skin, creating the artificial tactile fingertip by 3D printing a mesh of pin-like papillae (similar to tongue projections) on the underside of the skin.

“These papillae are made with advanced 3D printers that can mix soft and hard materials to create complex structures like those found in biology,” he said.

“When we turned the robot hand upside down and it worked for the first time, we were really excited because no one had ever done that before.”

Professor Lepola added that the robot would initially drop objects, but his team found the right way to use the tactile data to train the hand.

“All of a sudden it works, even when you're waving your hand around on the robotic arm,” he said.

Professor Repollas’s research has been made possible by the receipt of a Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award.

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