This dexterous robot hand can operate in complete darkness

Replicating the human hand

This task is a difficult feat because it requires constant repositioning of the fingers to keep the object stable. The researchers found that the robot hand could perform this task based solely on touch sensing. The team also found that the camera-less robot hand didn’t have to rely on light or vision to complete its tasks. This means the robot can operate under little to no light and even in complete darkness.

“While our demonstration was on a proof-of-concept task, meant to illustrate the capabilities of the hand, we believe that this level of dexterity will open up entirely new applications for robotic manipulation in the real world,” said Matei Ciocarlie, associate professor at Columbia. “Some of the more immediate uses might be in logistics and material handling, helping ease up supply chain problems like the ones that have plagued our economy in recent years, and in advanced manufacturing and assembly in factories.”

The robot hand has five fingers and 15 independently actuated joints. Each of these fingers is equipped with touch-sensing technology, which the team developed in-house. To test the capabilities of the robot hand, the team used a method called reinforcement learning, which involves endowing the robots with the ability to adapt, improve and reproduce tasks with changing constraints based on exploration and autonomous learning.

The ultimate goal of the team at Columbia is to combine the capability of this dexterous robot hand with abstract, semantic, and embodied intelligence. The team believes large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT4 or Google’s PALM may provide semantic intelligence.