Rich Walker, director of Shadow Robot Company, describes the company’s new robotic hand at ICRA in Yokohama, including its design, sensing, and repairability.
Shadow Robot has built robotic hands since the 1990s, starting with a maple wood hand that had 16 degrees of freedom but no sensing. Later hands used tendons routed through the joints, making them long, bulky, and mechanically complex. Wrist movement could loosen the tendons, while tight internal spaces made wear and repairs difficult.
Walker says Google DeepMind wanted reliable hardware with many sensors for reinforcement learning in real-world robot tasks. The new hand has three fingers in a tripod layout, four degrees of freedom per finger, and a larger, chunkier build than a human hand. Its fingers, tendons, and touch sensors can be replaced, and all 15 tendons can be changed in under an hour.
The hand combines magnetic textile sensors on the proximal phalanges with optical sensors at the fingertips. Each optical sensor uses a stereo camera pair to track printed dots inside the skin, producing a strong response to light touch. Five motors drive the finger joints through tendons that remain under tension, which Walker says avoids pauses caused by backlash when direction changes.
Although each finger has four degrees of freedom, Walker says some movements are hard to control separately in a human finger. The new hand’s flexibility makes it behave more like three thumbs. It is in production and, according to Walker, costs slightly less than a standard hammer.
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Rich Walker, director of Shadow Robot Company, discusses dexterous robot hands, their design trade-offs, and the challenges of bringing robotics into practical use with Robot Talk host Claire Asher.
Rich Walker, director of Shadow Robot Company, presents at Humanoids Summit on designing durable, sensor-rich dexterous hands for robot learning and humanoid applications.
