In the rapidly evolving robotics industry, today’s robots that might appear humanlike and dexterous still can’t do what people do, lacking the ability to perform fine manipulation tasks required in factories, homes, hospitals and farms. And with labor shortages expected to jeopardize more than $450 billion of the U.S. GDP by 2028, improving automation seems an intelligent solution.
In addition, advanced robotic hands and upper limb prosthetics are urgently needed to improve the quality of life for over 400,000 Americans living with upper limb loss and for more than 20 million people struggle with daily activities due to limited mobility. Yet they face the highest rates of abandonment of any assistive device.
That’s where Altus Dexterity comes in. It’s a collaborative team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Houston, creating skill-augmented hands, drawing from years of study on how people use their hands, to bridge this gap and bring functional dexterity to real-world applications. Altus Dexterity is part of the 2023 cohort of the NSF Bio-Inspired Design Innovations track, part of the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships and aligned to the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator program.
The NSF is now providing additional support to Altus Dexterity, up to $5 million to continue working on its robotic hand designs and test its products in real-world pilot projects.
“Our solution is a bio-inspired robotic hand that combines softness with strength, and all over sensing with dexterity,” said Nancy Pollard, a member of Altus Dexterity and a professor in the Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department at CMU. Pollard is leading the effort.
Making them move at UH
The robotic hand has a rigid skeleton inside with elastic material covering it. There are 12 electrodes in each finger to sense any contact force within this skin.
At UH, Alamgir Karim, Dow Chair and Welch Foundation Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and a member of Altus Dexterity, leads the team integrating polymers into the structure so that the fingers will move. As director of the International Polymer & Soft Matter Center at UH, Karim knows his polymers, which have the ability to use molecules to convert energy into motion.
“Our polymers need to be integrated with that structure so that they do actuation,” Karim said. “Polymers can be designed with functionality, with adhesive property, thermal property and electrical property to have that level of dexterity that we need.”
The UH team is developing hybrid polymeric materials that can mechanically retract (shrink) or relax with the application of low electric field below 10 Volts.
“The technical idea here is that the artificial fingers need to retract like unfolding and perform other motions like flexion (including abduction and adduction for thumb movement) from their gripping positions. UH technology will enable these in the artificial hands using the electrically responsive hybrid polymer actuation systems developed by our team,” said Karim.
For more on the development of the robotic hands, click here for a previous video on Atlus Dexterity.