Robot grippers and/or end effectors are changing as we know them. Researchers from EFPL and MIT released a video titled Beyond Manual Dexterity: Designing a Multi-fingered Robotic Hand for Grasping and Crawling, in which they demonstrated their latest invention of a robot hand. A detachable robot hand.
It doesn't sound that interesting until I tell you that it autonomously detaches itself from the robot, crawls over to objects, and picks them up.
The video was released in conjunction with a research paper (titled the same) at IEEE’s International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Rotterdam last week.
While reminiscent of Thing from The Addams Family, the creepy, bio-inspired copycat of a human hand seems similar until you see it in action. This autonomous crawling hand has five fingers and can grasp multiple objects at the same time. Where it differs from humans is that each finger has 4 degrees of freedom and can bend forward and backward, separately from each other. As you can see in the video below, it can pick up one object with two fingers bending forward, closing in on one side of the "palm" and the other three can bend backward while picking up the other object. Forward and backward are subjective terms in this case since it depends on the angle you're viewing it from—both sides are the same. Once the objects are grasped, the hand crawls back into a position where the robot can realign itself to connect back to the hand.
I enjoyed watching the researchers' graphics of finding the best finger placement and watching it crawl like a zombie across the screen.
The company behind this invention, Switzerland's EPFL, explores how robotic hands can go beyond existing confines to grasp an even wider range of objects. Interestingly, many robotics are nature-inspired and at the same time, are made to go beyond what nature can do—because why not? Sometimes it would be easier if my fingers could bend backwards. My brain is full of fog this morning so I can't think of a good scenario in which it would be beneficial, but I'm sure it would be.
In the video, you can see that it's sped up, which is still fairly slow. It's clear there's going to be much more research done on this to get it up to speed. I also imagine a future where people will use household robots with detachable hands to go get things for them when they don't want to get up from the couch—much like my father-in-law with his reacher grabber stick that he—albeit only sometimes—seriously uses.
