A prosthetic robotic hand than “knows” what it is holding and adjusts grip accordingly has been developed in the United States.
Johns Hopkins University engineers have detailed how the pioneering prosthetic could grip plush toys, water bottles, and other everyday objects like a human, carefully conforming and adjusting its grasp to avoid damaging or mishandling whatever it held.
PhD student Sriramana Sankar said the system’s hybrid design was a first for robotic hands, which had typically been too rigid or too soft to replicate a human’s touch when handling objects of varying textures and materials.
Mr Sankar said the innovation offered a promising solution for people with hand loss and could improve how robotic arms interacted with their environment.
“The goal from the beginning has been to create a prosthetic hand that we model based on the human hand’s physical and sensing capabilitie – a more natural prosthetic that functions and feels like a lost limb,” he said.
“We want to give people with upper-limb loss the ability to safely and freely interact with their environment, to feel and hold their loved ones without concern of hurting them.”
Mr Sankar the device was developed by the same lab that in 2018 created the world’s first electronic “skin” with a humanlike sense of pain.
He said it featured a multifinger system with rubberlike polymers and a rigid 3D-printed internal skeleton.
“Its three layers of tactile sensors, inspired by the layers of human skin, allow it to grasp and distinguish objects of various shapes and surface textures, rather than just detect touch.
“Each of its soft air-filled finger joints can be controlled with the forearm’s muscles, and machine learning algorithms focus the signals from the artificial touch receptors to create a realistic sense of touch.
“The sensory information from its fingers is translated into the language of nerves to provide naturalistic sensory feedback through electrical nerve stimulation.”
Read the full study: A natural biomimetic prosthetic hand with neuromorphic tactile sensing for precise and compliant grasping.
