Robotic Hand Demonstrates New Skills In The Dark

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have demonstrated a highly dexterous robot hand, one that combines an advanced sense of touch with motor learning algorithms in order to achieve a high level of dexterity.

As a demonstration of skill, the team chose a difficult manipulation task: executing an arbitrarily large rotation of an unevenly shaped grasped object in hand while always maintaining the object in a stable, secure hold. This is a very difficult task because it requires constant repositioning of a subset of fingers, while the other fingers have to keep the object stable. Not only was the hand able to perform this task, but it also did it without any visual feedback whatsoever, based solely on touch sensing.

In addition to the new levels of dexterity, the hand worked without any external cameras, so it’s immune to lighting, occlusion, or similar issues. And the fact that the hand does not rely on vision to manipulate objects means that it can do so in very difficult lighting conditions that would confuse vision-based algorithms—it can even operate in the dark.

“While our demonstration was on a proof-of-concept task, meant to illustrate the capabilities of the hand, we believe that this level of dexterity will open up entirely new applications for robotic manipulation in the real world,” said Matei Ciocarlie, associate professor in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science.

“Some of the more immediate uses might be in logistics and material handling, helping ease up supply chain problems like the ones that have plagued our economy in recent years, and in advanced manufacturing and assembly in factories.” Ciocarlie said.

As reported by techxplore.com.