It is strong enough to crush cans and so delicate that it can take an egg without breaking it. It can cut a sheet of paper with scissors and can even pick up small objects with tweezers. It is 'Ilda', the new light and compact artificial hand, designed to be applied to any robot that has to perform tasks with typically human precision and dexterity. His skills, useful for industry but not only, are described in Nature Communications by a group of researchers from South Korea led by Uikyum Kim of the Korea Institute of Machinery & Materials (Kimm) in Daejeon.
The strength of Ilda (Integrated Linkage-driven Dexterous Anthropomorphic) is the design of the mechanism, which allows you to enclose all the components necessary for movement and touch in an anthropomorphic hand that weighs only 1.1 kilograms and is 218 long. millimeters. With this configuration, the hand can be attached directly to any commercially available or developing robotic manipulator, without the need for additional parts such as the forearm. Compactness, however, does not penalize functionality.
The five fingers, moved by the actuators integrated in the palm of the hand, are equipped with 20 joints and 15 degrees of freedom of movement: their tip can exert a force equal to 34 Newtons.
"Many robotic hands have been developed so far, but their use has been limited by high costs due to complex manufacturing processes and difficulties in maintenance," the researchers write in the study. Their hope is that the new hand can be widely used in the field of research and industry precisely by virtue of its functionality and reduced costs.
"The original kinematic design of the hand mechanisms allows for a device that combines strength, agility and compactness", comments Antonio Frisoli, head of the Human-Robot Interaction Area of the Institute of Mechanical Intelligence of the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa.
"This mix could be useful for industrial robots that collaborate with humans through multiple robotic arms, because reducing the overall dimensions increases the safety of the interaction with the operator. It could also be useful for those robots that have to doing precision tasks by manipulating objects typically used by man: I am thinking, for example, of a robot-cook ".