Robotics experts team to create human-like hands

The €6.35m (£5.61m) HANDLE project gathers partners from Germany, Spain, France, Portugal, Sweden and the UK.

UK partner the Shadow Robot Company was established in 1987 and has been developing dexterous robotic hands for the past five years.

Speaking to The Engineer, Rich Walker, Shadow’s director, said that there were still many challenges facing robotics researchers in this area.

‘HANDLE is about looking at how humans learn to do manipulation and how can we transfer that to robot hands and what tips and tricks do humans use.

‘We knew there were challenges in manipulation that humans can do relatively easily but that are incredibly difficult for robots to do at the moment — for example, right now I’m twiddling a pen around my fingers.’

Part of the project involves looking in detail at how humans naturally do these tasks.

The team has a unique experimental set-up that includes a special glove with fingertip sensors to measure precise contact points when handling objects and head tracking to ascertain where attention is directed.