Shadow Robot Company

Assembly Line

Human hands are astonishing tools. Here's why robots are struggling to match them

đź“… Date:

✍️ Author: Claudia Baxter

đź”– Topics: Dexterous Manipulation

🏢 Organizations: Shadow Robot Company, DeepMind, University of Birmingham


Human sensory systems are so complex and our perceptive abilities so adept that reproducing dexterity at the same level as the human hand remains a formidable challenge. But the level of sophistication is rapidly increasing. Enter the DEX-EE robot. Developed by the Shadow Robot Company in collaboration with Google DeepMind, it’s a three-fingered robotic hand that uses tendon-style drivers to elicit 12 degrees of freedom. Designed for “dexterous manipulation research”, the team behind DEX-EE hope to demonstrate how physical interactions contribute to learning and the development of generalised intelligence.

Roboticists have long dreamed of automata with anthropomorphic dexterity good enough to perform undesirable, dangerous or repetitive tasks. Rustam Stolkin, a professor of robotics at the University of Birmingham, leads a project to develop highly dexterous AI-controlled robots capable of handling nuclear waste from the energy sector, for example. While this work typically uses remotely-controlled robots, Stolkin is developing autonomous vision-guided robots that can go where it is too dangerous for humans to venture.

During the course of a day, however, human hands undertake thousands of different tasks, adapting in order to handle a variety of different shapes, sizes and materials. And robotics has some way to go to compete with that. One recent test of a robotic hand using open-source components costing less than $5,000 (£4,000) found that it could be trained to reorientate objects in the air. However, when confronted with a challenging object – a rubber duck shaped toy – the robot still fumbled and dropped the rubber duck around 56% of the time.

Read more at BBC