In a makeover inspired by cockroach legs, the engineers, in Harvard and Yale’s joint effort, chose not to make their robotic hand smarter, but to redesign its form to suit a dumb robot. Researchers from Harvard and Yale Universities have developed a simple, soft robotic hand that can grab a range of objects delicately, and which automatically adjusts its fingers to get a good grip. The new hand could also potentially be useful as a prosthetic arm. “People have been trying to build robotic hands for 20 or 30 years, but those hands have rarely been able to perform dexterous tasks,” said Robert D. Howe, who heads Harvard's BioRobotics Laboratory. Howe worked with Aaron Dollar, a former graduate student and now an assistant professor of engineering at Yale, to develop the new hand. Dollar's robotic hand consists of four fingers made out of a flexible, durable polymer. A single motor and spool tugs on the finger joints to open and close the hand. He then embedded two piezoelectric sensors--which report physical contact as a voltage response--into each of the four fingers through a molding process called shape deposition manufacturing (SDM). This process allows different materials to be deposited one layer at a time, so that sensors or other items can be set inside the material, which also protects those components. For more information please visit: http://biorobotics.harvard.edu/
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