2025 LASA/CREATE/EPFL CC BY SA.
By Celia Luterbacher
With its opposable thumb, a number of joints and gripping pores and skin, human fingers are sometimes thought of to be the head of dexterity, and lots of robotic fingers are designed of their picture. However having been formed by the sluggish strategy of evolution, human fingers are removed from optimized, with the most important drawbacks together with our single, asymmetrical thumbs and attachment to arms with restricted mobility.
“We will simply see the constraints of the human hand when trying to succeed in objects beneath furnishings or behind cabinets, or performing simultaneous duties like holding a bottle whereas selecting up a chip can,” says Aude Billard, head of the Studying Algorithms and Techniques Laboratory (LASA) in EPFL’s College of Engineering. “Likewise, accessing objects positioned behind the hand whereas maintaining the grip secure may be extraordinarily difficult, requiring awkward wrist contortions or physique repositioning.”
A crew composed of Billard, LASA researcher Xiao Gao, and Kai Junge and Josie Hughes from the Computational Robotic Design and Fabrication Lab designed a robotic hand that overcomes these challenges. Their gadget, which might help as much as six equivalent silicone-tipped fingers, fixes the issue of human asymmetry by permitting any mixture of fingers to kind opposing pairs in a thumb-like pinch. Because of its reversible design, the ‘again’ and ‘palm’ of the robotic hand are interchangeable. The hand may even detach from its robotic arm and ‘crawl’, spider-like, to understand and carry objects past the arm’s attain.
“Our gadget reliably and seamlessly performs ‘loco manipulation’ — stationary manipulation mixed with autonomous mobility – which we consider has nice potential for industrial, service, and exploratory robotics,” Billard summarizes. The analysis has been printed in Nature Communications.
Human functions – and past
Whereas the robotic hand seems to be like one thing from a futuristic sci-fi film, the researchers say they drew inspiration from nature.
“Many organisms have developed versatile limbs that seamlessly change between totally different functionalities like greedy and locomotion. For instance, the octopus makes use of its versatile arms each to crawl throughout the seafloor and open shells, whereas within the insect world, the praying mantis use specialised limbs for locomotion and prey seize,” Billard says.
Certainly, the EPFL robotic can crawl whereas sustaining a grip on a number of objects, holding them below its ‘palm’, on its ‘again’, or each. With 5 fingers, the gadget can replicate a lot of the conventional human grasps. When geared up with greater than 5 fingers, it might single-handedly deal with duties normally requiring two human fingers – similar to unscrewing the cap on a big bottle or driving a screw right into a block of wooden with a screwdriver.
“There isn’t any actual limitation within the variety of objects it might maintain; if we have to maintain extra objects, we merely add extra fingers,” Billard says.
The researchers foresee functions of their modern design in real-world settings that demand compactness, adaptability, and multi-modal interplay. For instance, the expertise might be used to retrieve objects in confined environments or broaden the attain of conventional industrial arms. And whereas the proposed robotic hand just isn’t itself anthropomorphic, additionally they consider it might be tailored for prosthetic functions.
“The symmetrical, reversible performance is especially helpful in eventualities the place customers may gain advantage from capabilities past regular human perform,” Billard says. “For instance, earlier research with customers of extra robotic fingers show the mind’s outstanding adaptability to combine extra appendages, suggesting that our non-traditional configuration might even serve in specialised environments requiring augmented manipulation talents.”
Reference
A removable crawling robotic hand, Xiao Gao (高霄), Kunpeng Yao (姚坤鹏), Kai Junge, Josie Hughes & Aude Billard, Nat Commun 17, 428 (2026).
EPFL
(École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) is a analysis institute and college in Lausanne, Switzerland, that focuses on pure sciences and engineering.
EPFL
(École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) is a analysis institute and college in Lausanne, Switzerland, that focuses on pure sciences and engineering.
