Bristol makes breakthrough in robotic hand development

The robotic hand is capable of sensing and rotating objects in any direction and orientation, a task which the Bristol team said it can do when the hand is upside down – something which has never been done before.

According to the researchers, improving the dexterity of robot hands could have significant implications for automating tasks such as handling goods for supermarkets or sorting through waste for recycling.

In 2019, OpenAI became the first to show human-like feats of dexterity with a robot hand, though their 20-strong robotics team was disbanded soon after the launch. OpenAI’s set up used a cage holding 19 cameras and over 6,000 CPUs to learn huge neural networks which could control the hands, but this operation would have required significant costs.

Professor Nathan Lepora and his colleagues said that they wanted to see if similar results could be achieved using simpler and more cost-efficient methods.