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 arms are sometimes thought-about to be the head of dexterity, and lots of robotic arms are designed of their picture. However having been formed by the sluggish strategy of evolution, human arms are removed from optimized, with the most important 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 achieve 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 Techniques Laboratory (LASA) in EPFL’s College of Engineering. “Likewise, accessing objects positioned behind the hand whereas holding the grip steady may be extraordinarily difficult, requiring awkward wrist contortions or physique repositioning.”

A group 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 system, which might assist as much as six similar 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 understand and carry objects past the arm’s attain.

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

Human functions – and past

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

“Many organisms have developed 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 below its ‘palm’, on its ‘again’, or each. With 5 fingers, the system can replicate many of the conventional human grasps. When geared up with greater than 5 fingers, it may well single-handedly sort out duties often requiring two human arms – 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 may well maintain; if we have to maintain extra objects, we merely add extra fingers,” Billard says.

The researchers foresee functions of their progressive design in real-world settings that demand compactness, adaptability, and multi-modal interplay. For instance, the expertise might 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, additionally they imagine it might be tailored for prosthetic functions.

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

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).