Robotic hand can identify objects with just one grasp

Inspired by the human finger, MIT researchers have developed a robotic hand that uses high-resolution touch sensing to accurately identify an object after grasping it just one time. Using this design, the researchers built a three-fingered robotic hand that could identify objects after only one grasp, with about 85 percent accuracy. Our goal with this work was to combine all the things that make our human hands so good into a robotic finger that can do tasks other robotic fingers can’t currently do,” says mechanical engineering graduate student Sandra Liu, co-lead author of a research paper on the robotic finger. The researchers designed the mold with a curved shape so the robotic fingers are slightly curved when at rest, just like human fingers. Because the hand has tactile sensing covering all of its fingers, it can gather rich tactile data from a single grasp.