A new robotic hand that can do what a human one can't

Researchers have designed a detachable hand that can grip multiple objects

- ARI DANIEL

AS A MOTHER of three, Aude Billard, a roboticist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, frequently finds herself needing to hold many objects at once.

“I constantly have tons of things under my arms and in my fingers,” she said, adding: “I use my entire body to grasp things.” In these situations, Billard has noticed that “the fantastic human hand is not that fantastic.”

“When you want to grab something that is behind you, you have to rotate your hand and do very complex motion,” she said. And so, for years, Billard has been dreaming about creating a more capable robotic picker-upper.

On Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, she and her colleagues presented a design for a hand-like robot that’s, in some ways, more dexterous and versatile than our claspers. It can even detach from the rest of the robot to “crawl and grasp several objects and then come back to become a hand again,’ said Xiao Gao, a roboticist now at Wuhan University.