Shadow Hand withstands the rigours AI research

Around five years in the making, the new Shadow Hand was built by Shadow Robot Company for Google DeepMind.

“They found that all robot hardware used for machine learning was not really up to the job,” Rich Walker, director of London-headquartered Shadow Robot Company, told a press briefing.

Walker added that robots developed for AI research can literally fall apart when used beyond their design parameters, fail to acquire useful data because of the way they are designed for control and operation, cannot operate for long periods without needing a restart or reset, or are not built with the assumption that interaction and collision are normal for it, which leads to damage.

“And lastly, almost all the robots that they've looked at, even the ones that were pretty robust and pretty reliable, didn't have the kind of dexterity and manipulation capabilities that DeepMind really cared about,” said Walker.

Known for Dextrous Hand, Shadow Robot’s five-digit flagship product, the company’s new solution ‘is a lot chunkier’ with each easily swappable finger weighing 1.2kg and the total unit weighing 4.1kg.