Our hands are pretty amazing, and it's easy to take that for granted until we try and build a robot that replicates that.

MIT has made a number of advancements in replicating the human hand for robots, and it recently published new research on the topic.

The new robot that was developed at MIT is being shown off at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, and it features modular fingers that are made of silicone and have sensors embedded within them. The fingers are dexterous enough to be able to softly pick up something like a piece of paper without needing to be programmed to know what it is holding.

The silicone fingers are ribbed on the inside to make it easier for them to bend, and they're slid over the metal digits on a robot. Thanks to the silicone and the new sensing system, the robot can pick up extremely fragile objects without doing any damage. The robot can also pick up objects that range greatly in size without knowing anything about what the object is before picking it up.

While that might not sound like that big of a deal, it's a pretty big feat. It is pretty difficult to program a robot to anticipate things like size and weight, as well as the shape of the object that it is supposed to hold.

In the paper, called "Haptic Identification of Objects using a Modular Soft Robotic Gripper," the team behind the project explained that, where each finger bends, there is a sensor detecting whether or not it's touching the object. This tells the robot where to tighten its grip.

Programming a robot to be able to pick up objects could be very helpful, especially for those trying to make robots more human-like. Check out the video below to see the robot in action.

Via: Gizmodo