This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
It's quite common for humans—especially those who work in manufacturing—to tie a knot, strip the casing off a cable, insert a pin in a hole or use a hand tool such as a drill. They may seem like simple tasks, but are really very complex and involve extremely fine finger and hand motions.
Though robots are getting more and more involved in factory work and in a wide range of other types of jobs—including in the service industry and health care—their dexterity is not nearly as impressive. Since people first brought them to work in automotive factories more than 50 years ago, we have built robots that can weld, paint and assemble parts quite well. Today's best robotic hands can pick up familiar objects and move them to other places—such as taking products from warehouse bins and putting them in boxes.
But robots can't orient a hand tool properly—say, lining up a Phillips head screwdriver with the grooves on a screw, or aiming a hammer at a nail. And they definitely can't use two hands together in detailed ways, like replacing the batteries in a remote control.
Human hands are excellent at those tasks and much more. To even come close to rivaling what our hands are easily capable of, robot hands need better agility, reliability and strength – and they need to be able to sense more accurately and move even more finely than they do now, to figure out what they're holding and how to grip it best. For robots to be able to work alongside humans, we'll have to figure out how to make robots that can literally lend us a hand when our own two are not enough.
My research group at Northeastern University is working on doing just this, in particular for humanoid robots like NASA's Valkyrie, which has three fingers and a thumb on each hand. Each digit has knuckle-like joints, and each hand has a wrist that can rotate easily. We're working on creating motions—combinations of arm, wrist, finger and thumb movements that collectively accomplish a task, like moving a wrench in a circle to tighten a bolt, or pulling a cart from one place to another.
Each of these industrial robots has multiple specialized tools. Could many of their tasks be done by robotic hands?
The importance of hands
Faster development and testing
These abilities are already second nature to humans through vision and proprioception (the ability to sense the relative positions of body parts without looking or thinking about it). Once we're able to achieve them in robots, they'll be able to do things like detect if a grasp is too strong and is squeezing an object too hard.
Planning coordinated movements
Another milestone will be developing methods for robots to figure out what motions they need to make in real time, including sensing what's going on in their hands at each moment. If a robot hand can detect changes in objects it is handling, or manipulate items while holding them, they could help with those common manual tasks like knot-tying and wire-stripping.
Working with two hands together is even farther into the future, though it would provide a significant boost, particularly for manufacturing. A robot that can operate a drill with two hands or pass machine parts from one hand to the other would be big improvements, allowing factories to automate even more steps in their processes.
We humans haven't developed these systems yet. Achieving human-like autonomous robot dexterity will keep robotics researchers, technologists and innovators busy in the foreseeable future. It won't slow down the ongoing robotics revolution in manufacturing, because current processes still have lots of room for automation to improve safety, speed and quality. But as we make robots even better, they'll be able to give us a hand.
Taskin Padir, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University
Uncommon Knowledge
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