A UNSW student has designed one of the first soft robotic hands that can pick up, put down, paint and hammer with ease.
Technically called an anthropomorphic end effector, the and will fit onto one or two mechanical arms called collaborative robots, assembled by UNSW Built Environment researchers and technicians last year.
The robotic arms, nicknamed Betty and Arnold, are two of just six in Australia.
Charlotte Firth, who is creating the robotic hand as part of her Master of Computational Design degree said industrial robots are so dangerous the way they are now.
“Being able to create soft robots would change the way humans interact with them and it will take out the element of danger,” Firth said.
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Firth and her supervisors, Kate Dunn and Hank Haeusler who run the robotics program in the Design Futures Lab will begin trialling the hand’s capability at the end of 2020.
“We’ll be testing [the hand as an attachment on the robotic arms] and actually seeing if that soft material has the capability to hammer a nail, pick up a paintbrush and be able to paint and trim,” Firth said.
The collaborative robots, known as cobots, have stop sensors that enable them to work alongside humans in various workplaces. The two arms need to be sensitive enough to work alongside people without hurting them, whether it’s hammering on construction sites or bone drilling in surgical situations.
This is why Firth is creating the cobot’s hand out of softer silicone material and making the palm more human-like in its range of motion to allow it to do more tasks.
She said most robotic hands currently on the market are two-pronged grippers and do not mimic the motion of the human palm when picking up, grasping and putting down objects.
“People have focused a lot more on the finger design and how we move them towards our hands,” she said.
“But no one has actually focused on the hand as a whole and how your palm works within that process.
“When you grab something, you don’t just fold your fingers down to grip a tool, you actually move your whole hand with it.”
Firth says the robotic hand will cut time and costs for businesses, as cobots on construction sites usually need more than one ‘end effector’ to do a range of actions and activities.
“Anthropomorphic end effectors cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and they’re quite hard to get your hands on,” she says.
“Everything else is just really basic, or suction grip that can only pick up flat sheets. So the idea behind this is if you want a robot on site then you want it to be able to carry out multiple tasks.”