5 fingers aren’t enough for you? Do you wish to have extra finger when opening a soda bottle or peeling a banana? Good news for you: MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) upgrades human hand with two extra robot fingers.
Four fingers and a thumb on each hand is pretty useful. Humans have gone from caves to sprawling cities in part because of our dexterous digits.
But researchers at MIT think we could do even better if we had an upgrade. They have developed a glove with two extra robotic fingers that respond intelligently to your movements, allowing you to perform two-handed tasks with just one robot-enhanced hand.
* The robotic fingers use an algorithm to work out * Extra fingers move in sync without needing to be told what to do * Wearer can use it hold the base of a bottle while twisting off its cap * Future versions could fold up into a bracelet “You do not need to command the robot, but simply move your fingers naturally,” said Harry Asada, the Ford Professor of Engineering in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Then the robotic fingers react and assist your fingers.” “Every day, we use various tools, say a knife and fork and we drive a car and, if we use these tools for a long time, you see that those tools are just an extension of your body,” said Asada. In a video demonstrating the glove, Asada and Wu show the glove assisting in several tasks, including holding a box while your human fingers open the lid, holding a bottle while you unscrew the cap and, perhaps somewhat awkwardly, holding a cup while you stir it. “With the assistance of the SR fingers the users can grasp objects that are usually too difficult for them to do with a single hand. For example objects that are too large, too heavy or the surface of the object is too hot or too cold,” said a researcher. The developers said their work up until this point was focused on perfecting the posture and movement of the robotic fingers. “But it’s not the whole story,” said graduate student Faye Wu, who presented a paper on the fingers this week at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference in California. She said: “There are other things that make a good, stable grasp. With an object that looks small but is heavy, or is slippery, the posture would be the same, but the force would be different, so how would it adapt to that? That’s the next thing we’ll look at.” MIT says the next step is to slim down the technology and that they hope it could be used to restore extra mobility to the disability or elderly.
The researchers at MIT have developed robotic fingers
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