MIT robotic hand identifies objects in single grasp

Unlike other designs, MIT’s robotic finger is built with a rigid skeleton encased in a soft outer layer containing high-resolution sensors under its transparent ‘skin.’ The sensors use a camera and LEDs to gather visual information about an object’s shape and provide continuous sensing along the length of the finger.

Using this design, the researchers built a three-fingered robotic hand that could identify objects after one grasp with about 85 per cent accuracy. The rigid skeleton makes the fingers strong enough to pick up heavy items, while the soft skin enables them to securely grasp a pliable item without crushing it.

“Having both soft and rigid elements is very important in any hand, but so is being able to perform great sensing over a really large area, especially if we want to consider doing very complicated manipulation tasks like what our own hands can do. Our goal with this work was to combine all the things that make our human hands so good into a robotic finger that can do tasks other robotic fingers can’t currently do,” said mechanical engineering graduate student Sandra Liu, co-lead author of a research paper on the robotic finger.