It may not look like it, but robots are everywhere. It just so happens that some of the robots that are already in use are mostly confined to factories and other production facilities, tasked with repeating the same action with a stable efficiency and a predictable result.
These robots have since taken over the jobs that humans used to have, which have resulted in significant increases to production rates without putting the human that would have supplanted it at risk of exposure to dangerous agents like chemicals and work hazards.
As a result, robots are also often not the humanoid, walking hunks of metal that we often see referenced in popular culture, like in movies or TV shows. In fact, most robots aren’t even humanoid at all—after all, they’re only really in the places where they are to do one or more jobs with a predictable and controllable result. Thus, most industrial robots skip the humanoid look and go for something a bit more functional.
Sometimes, though, it doesn’t hurt to take design cues from things in nature every now and then—especially if they bring about a specific purpose in mind. This, at least, seems to be the case with a new robotic hand designed as a collaboration between scientists from the University of Malaga (UM) and the University College London (UCL).
The robotic hand, coined the “Rolling Fingers” robot, doesn’t exactly hide its unique function; it’s a hand-shaped robot whose finger “parts” can roll along the axis of the finger, granting reorientation via rotation to whatever it is holding at that moment without having to let go first and reorient the hand. Their new research was published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
The project was led by University of Malaga tele-robotics professor Jesús M. Gómez, and was configured to be a robot hand with three “fingers”; each of the fingers is wrapped with rotating “skin” rings that are capable of rotating around the axis of the finger at varying speeds. The “skin” in Rolling Fingers is made of rubber, which gives it excellent grip on any objects it can hold.
Given the several points of articulation within each finger, Gómez and team enabled the robot to grasp any object by contorting its fingers to the rough shape of the object being held, which also allows Rolling Fingers to rotate the object without letting it go. This, the authors say, reduces the time required to do complicated functions that require the repositioning of tools being held by robots like Rolling Fingers.
Said Gómez in a University of Malaga press release via AlphaGalileo: “Before, when a mobile robot had to perform any task, whether industrial or clinical, it needed two hands.” Gómez referred to the case of a robotic assistant in a hospital that checks patients’ heart rates, one hand is needed for the actual probe to measure heart rate, while another is required to roll up a patient’s sleeves prior to examination.
“It is the first prototype of highly articulated adaptive fingers with a skin that is able to rotate around its axis at different speeds, and at the same time the finger can perform tendon-driven adaptive grasping actions,” according to the same University of Malaga press release. “Its capability to safely manipulate non-rigid objects in-hand—that is, without dropping the object—adds great potential to any robotic arm and simplifies the process considerably.”
Gómez and team are already hard at work in creating a robot with four fingers instead of just three, which they expect to exercise an even greater freedom of movement; this may increase the possibilities in which Rolling Fingers-like robots can aid in industrial or medical applications.
Following this, they also plan to deploy a demonstration for an industrial setup—and, hopefully afterwards, for human-robot interactions.
(For more tech news, read further about the computers that brought humanity to the Moon and back. After that, check out how machine learning found a “ghost” lineage hidden within the human genome.)
References
- Coxworth, B. (2021, November 10). Unique robotic hand can rotate objects without releasing its grasp. New Atlas. https://newatlas.com/robotics/rolling-fingers-robotic-hand/
- Gómez-de-Gabriel, J. M., & Wurdemann, H. A. (2021). Adaptive underactuated finger with active rolling surface. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 6(4), 8253–8260. https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2021.3105729
- University of Malaga. (2021, November 11). “Rolling fingers”, the robotic hand designed by the UMAthat moves objects in a single grasp. AlphaGalileo. https://www.alphagalileo.org/en-gb/Item-Display/ItemId/214547?returnurl=https://www.alphagalileo.org/en-gb/Item-Display/ItemId/214547
