A helping hand for robotic manipulator design

Tactile sensors are incorporated through a knitted glove that fits snugly over the robotic hand. Akin to building with digital LEGOs, a designer uses the interface to construct a robotic manipulator from a set of modular components that are guaranteed to be manufacturable. The user can adjust the palm and fingers of the robotic hand, tailoring it to a specific task, and then easily integrate tactile sensors into the final design. MIT researchers have created an interactive design pipeline that streamlines and simplifies the process of crafting a customized robotic hand with tactile sensors. The egg-grabbing manipulator never broke or dropped the egg during testing, and the paper-cutting manipulator could use a wider range of scissors than any existing robotic hand they could find in the literature.