Robot Hands: The 40-Year Quest for the Perfect Grip

Building robot hands is one of the toughest challenges in robotics today. Back in the late 1990s, Shadow Robot built their first robotic hand using simple materials like wood, springs, and rubber bands. Rich Walker, now a director at the company, remembers how they used whatever they had to create it. Today, Shadow Robot’s hands are much more advanced. They have electric motors inside the arms that pull on metal tendons, allowing the fingers to move with great accuracy. To use these hands, people wear sensors on their fingers, and the robot hand copies their movements. Even beginners can quickly learn to pick up and move blocks and cups smoothly. Around 200 of these hands are being used, mostly by researchers at universities and technology companies, to study how robots can become more dexterous.

Rich Walker explains that developing robot hands is important because most tools and devices are designed for human hands. If robots are going to work in the human world, they need hands that can do many different tasks. Bren Pierce, who started the robotics company Kinisi in Bristol, agrees. His company’s KR1 robots are being tested in real workplaces. These robots can use different grippers, like strong pincers for heavy boxes or suction cups for delicate items. However, Pierce and many others in the industry dream of creating one robot hand that can do everything, just like a human hand. Kinisi has built a three-fingered hand that works well, but it is expensive to make. Their prototype costs about £4,000, which is ten times more than the simple pincers they use now. Making a hand that is strong, flexible, and affordable is a big challenge.

Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, has said that making a good robot hand is one of the three hardest problems in building humanoid robots. The other two are creating artificial intelligence that understands the world and making robots in large numbers. Tesla is working on a humanoid robot called Optimus, which Musk says will have hands as skilled as human hands. But Nathan Lepora, a professor of robotics and AI at Bristol University, is not convinced this will happen soon. He thinks it could take another ten years to reach that level of skill. Lepora is working on hands that use tendons to move the fingers, and he believes that more advanced tendon systems will lead to better and cheaper robot hands. He is also impressed by Chinese companies that are putting motors directly into the fingers, which could make hands more effective. Wuji Technology in Shanghai has created a hand where each finger has four joints that can move independently, allowing for very detailed movements. Their hand also has sensors that let it feel pressure, giving it a sense of touch. Right now, their hand is expensive, but they hope to make it cheaper in the future. Making robot hands that can feel and last a long time is still a big challenge, but with more investment and new ideas, progress is being made. Many experts believe that robot hands will keep getting better as more money and research go into the field.