Carnegie Mellon University professor and Future Hand Robotics founder Nancy Pollard explains how compliant interaction, broad contact areas, and hand design can help robots handle dexterous tasks in the real world.
Pollard describes dexterity as solving problems and forming strategies as challenges arise. Robots handle structured work well but still struggle with adaptive, contact-heavy tasks such as plugging small connectors into steering sensors, harvesting bell peppers, and assisting with care.
People often bump their hands or objects into nearby surfaces, then adjust moments later and finish the task. Pollard contrasts this with a nurse anesthetist's prosthetic, which made simple pickups difficult, and demonstrates a compliant 12-degree-of-freedom hand that can lift small objects and tolerate collisions.
Thermal imaging and motion capture reveal contact patches across the hand, such as when turning a door handle. Pollard's group represents these patches so they can be mapped to different hands and objects; this helps artists create convincing grasps and supports transferring caregiver bathing motions to a robot.
Pollard studies recurring hand poses as building blocks for tasks including clay sculpting and trauma care. Her group tested many designs and found that some could perform intended motions right away, while detailed rolling and sliding across real tool surfaces, such as a screwdriver's grooves, can inform better hand mechanisms.
Examples such as a Shadow Robot hand that could not close around a frying-pan handle show how design details can block real tasks. Pollard favors rigid structure for force and strength, combined with soft surfaces for compliant contact, and says useful tactile sensors must be compact, flexible, fast, and easy to package.
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Professor Nancy Pollard of Carnegie Mellon University discusses practical robot dexterity at an MIT Robotics seminar, drawing on research with her team and collaborators.
Nancy Pollard, professor of robotics and computer science at Carnegie Mellon and co-founder and president of FutureHand Robotics, discusses building dexterous robot hands for real-world tasks at a CMU Robotics Institute seminar introduced by Henny Admoni.
