New two-fingered robotic hand tackles everyday manipulation tasks in real-world experiments

To effectively assist humans in their daily tasks in a wide range of real-world situations, robots must be able to efficiently and dexterously manipulate different types of objects. The development of novel, cost-effective robotic grippers or other artificial hand-like systems plays a key role in enabling dexterous manipulation of objects by robots.

Researchers from the Improbable AI Lab and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently designed a new two-fingered robotic gripper designed to more efficiently tackle everyday manipulation tasks.

Their proposed robotic system, presented in a paper on the preprint server arXiv and to be included in the proceedings of IEEE ICRA 2024, can successfully grasp objects of different shapes and textures and then place them in specified locations.

“We have provided the mechanical and dynamic requirements for a robotic finger capable of performing 30 diverse everyday tasks,” Rubén Castro Ornelas, Tomás Cantú, and colleagues wrote in their paper. “To meet these requirements, we present a finger design based on serial elastic actuation that we call the Everyday Finger. Our goal is to make the fingers as compact as possible while still achieving the desired performance.”

The robotic gripper designed by the researchers consists of a structure from which two robotic fingers protrude. These two fingers resemble human fingers in size and shape, which allows them to bend and firmly grasp objects.

The team’s human-like fingers were designed to perform simple, everyday tasks, like grasping objects and placing them in a specific location, as opposed to more complex and advanced manual tasks. While the team initially created a 2-degree-of-freedom (DoF) gripper using just two of its robotic fingers, they hope to create grippers with more fingers in the future.

“Our finger has only two degrees of freedom,” the researchers wrote. “With a third degree of freedom, the palm size would increase. It would be difficult to fit five fingers into a hand in a future iteration, but a three- and perhaps four-fingered hand is still possible. To make a full five-fingered hand, we may have to wait until higher-torque actuators become available.”

To evaluate the performance of their two-fingered gripper, they tested it in a series of real-world experiments. These experiments evaluated the speed and flexibility of their system, as well as the force it applied to objects when performing three basic pick-and-place tasks.

“We evaluated everyday fingers by building a two-fingered robotic hand that was tested on various performance parameters and tasks such as picking and placing dishes in a holder, picking thin, flat objects like paper, and delicate objects like strawberries,” Ornelas, Cantú, and colleagues wrote.

In real-world experiments, the researchers’ two-fingered gripper performed remarkably well, successfully completing the three basic tasks it was tested for. While these are very basic tasks, they reflect activities that humans engage in every day.

The promising results obtained during the first tests therefore underline the interest of the gripper for the development of basic domestic robots. In the future, the researchers could further improve the design of their gripper and evaluate its performance on a wider range of daily tasks.

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