As a mother of three, Aude Billard, a roboticist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, frequently finds herself needing to hold many objects at once.
“I constantly have tons of things under my arms and in my fingers,” she said, adding: “I use my entire body to grasp things.”
In these situations, Dr. Billard has noticed that “the fantastic human hand is not that fantastic.”
“When you want to grab something that is behind you, you have to rotate your hand and do very complex motion,” she said.
And so, for years, Dr. Billard has been dreaming about creating a more capable robotic picker-upper. On Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, she and her colleagues presented a design for a hand-like robot that’s, in some ways, more dexterous and versatile than our claspers. It can even detach from the rest of the robot to “crawl and grasp several objects and then come back to become a hand again,” said Xiao Gao, a roboticist now at Wuhan University.
The result is something akin to Thing from “The Addams Family” — with all the scamper and skill, but none of the skin or snark. (Despite the resemblance, neither researcher had heard of Thing until they began showing their new robot to others. “So no, it was definitely not inspired by that,” Dr. Billard said.)
The team built the robot out of silicone, motors and an assortment of 3-D-printed components. The palm is a disc to which multiple identical fingers can be attached. The robot’s software studies how to hold objects in a simulator. Those instructions are then loaded onto the real-world device to carry out the task in the real world.
Dr. Billard explained that most robotic hands developed over the years grip one object at a time with their fingertips. Efforts to make them more complex have generally tried to replicate the human hand more closely, along with its imperfections.
The new approach took time to develop. The researchers first honed their design with computer simulations, developing a generic framework that determines the best arrangement of flexible fingers and the sequence in which the digits should be activated for the hand to hold different kinds of objects, and multiple items at once.
The engineered result handily overcomes some of the constraints that our anatomy imposes. For instance, the human hand has a single thumb for pinching against another digit. A key innovation with the new robotic hand was to allow every possible pairing of digits to clasp and grip an item. In addition, the fingers can wrap themselves singly or multiply around an object — or can pin that object to the plastic palm to carry it.
The machine can also grab things on both sides of the palm simultaneously by using different combinations of fingers, giving the hand a flexible kind of symmetry.
Then there’s its detachability, transforming the device into “an independent crawling robot to go someplace that normal robots cannot go,” Dr. Gao said. Released as a kind of mechanical spider, the robotic hand uses its digits to scuttle along a surface. The fingers can be deployed as graspers or legs interchangeably, and occasionally the robot knuckles along if it needs a digit for both tasks.
Dr. Gao sees practical applications for the detachability, allowing the hand to inspect the tight quarters inside a water pipe or a submarine’s engine room, grasping and removing troublesome foreign objects. Dr. Billard wonders whether, down the road, someone using such a hand as a prosthesis could interact with it neurologically.
Still, there may be limitations to this robot’s features. A digit that can flex in opposing directions, for example, may not be able to apply the same level of pressure to a surface that a more rigid human finger can, according to Nancy Pollard, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University who didn’t participate in the research. She also reported not noticing much evidence of manipulation of the objects once they were held.
Perla Maiolino, a deputy director of the Oxford Robotics Institute who was not involved in the project, found the approach innovative. She hasn’t seen a robotic hand capable of detachment before, or one that can clench on both sides of the palm. And by fusing these elements together, such a hand is “increasing the taxonomy of grasping,” she said.
This also got Dr. Maiolino reflecting on the power of creating something that doesn’t simply mimic a pre-existing biological form. Rather, it reimagines robotic elements in ways that extend their capabilities.
That’s exactly what Dr. Billard is hoping for — that this new robot will lead to a burst of innovation.
“I believe this is what science is about,” she said.
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