Reversible, removable robotic hand redefines dexterity

2025 LASA/CREATE/EPFL CC BY SA.

By Celia Luterbacher

With its opposable thumb, a number of joints and gripping pores and skin, human palms are sometimes thought-about to be the head of dexterity, and lots of robotic palms are designed of their picture. However having been formed by the gradual means of evolution, human palms are removed from optimized, with the largest drawbacks together with our single, asymmetrical thumbs and attachment to arms with restricted mobility.

“We are able to simply see the constraints of the human hand when making an attempt to succeed in objects beneath furnishings or behind cabinets, or performing simultaneous duties like holding a bottle whereas selecting up a chip can,” says Aude Billard, head of the Studying Algorithms and Programs Laboratory (LASA) in EPFL’s Faculty of Engineering. “Likewise, accessing objects positioned behind the hand whereas holding the grip steady will be extraordinarily difficult, requiring awkward wrist contortions or physique repositioning.”

A staff composed of Billard, LASA researcher Xiao Gao, and Kai Junge and Josie Hughes from the Computational Robotic Design and Fabrication Lab designed a robotic hand that overcomes these challenges. Their gadget, which might assist as much as six equivalent silicone-tipped fingers, fixes the issue of human asymmetry by permitting any mixture of fingers to type opposing pairs in a thumb-like pinch. Due to its reversible design, the ‘again’ and ‘palm’ of the robotic hand are interchangeable. The hand may even detach from its robotic arm and ‘crawl’, spider-like, to know and carry objects past the arm’s attain.

“Our gadget reliably and seamlessly performs ‘loco manipulation’ — stationary manipulation mixed with autonomous mobility – which we consider has nice potential for industrial, service, and exploratory robotics,” Billard summarizes. The analysis has been printed in Nature Communications.

Human purposes – and past

Whereas the robotic hand appears like one thing from a futuristic sci-fi film, the researchers say they drew inspiration from nature.

“Many organisms have advanced versatile limbs that seamlessly change between completely different functionalities like greedy and locomotion. For instance, the octopus makes use of its versatile arms each to crawl throughout the seafloor and open shells, whereas within the insect world, the praying mantis use specialised limbs for locomotion and prey seize,” Billard says.

Certainly, the EPFL robotic can crawl whereas sustaining a grip on a number of objects, holding them beneath its ‘palm’, on its ‘again’, or each. With 5 fingers, the gadget can replicate a lot of the conventional human grasps. When outfitted with greater than 5 fingers, it will possibly single-handedly deal with duties normally requiring two human palms – comparable to unscrewing the cap on a big bottle or driving a screw right into a block of wooden with a screwdriver.

“There isn’t any actual limitation within the variety of objects it will possibly maintain; if we have to maintain extra objects, we merely add extra fingers,” Billard says.

The researchers foresee purposes of their modern design in real-world settings that demand compactness, adaptability, and multi-modal interplay. For instance, the expertise could possibly be used to retrieve objects in confined environments or increase the attain of conventional industrial arms. And whereas the proposed robotic hand shouldn’t be itself anthropomorphic, in addition they consider it could possibly be tailored for prosthetic purposes.

“The symmetrical, reversible performance is especially invaluable in eventualities the place customers may benefit from capabilities past regular human operate,” Billard says. “For instance, earlier research with customers of extra robotic fingers exhibit the mind’s exceptional adaptability to combine extra appendages, suggesting that our non-traditional configuration might even serve in specialised environments requiring augmented manipulation talents.”

Reference

A removable crawling robotic hand, Xiao Gao (高霄), Kunpeng Yao (姚坤鹏), Kai Junge, Josie Hughes & Aude Billard, Nat Commun 17, 428 (2026).