Robots Just Got Fingertips

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Robots Just Got Fingertips

Researchers outfitted a robot hand with "a novel tactile sensor" able to grasp and manipulate a USB plug.

Robots are already running like humansgalloping like animals, and even opening doors (kind of), but researchers from MIT and Northeastern University have outfitted a robot hand with "a novel tactile sensor" giving it the ability to grasp and manipulate a USB plug.

What does that mean? Well, ostensibly, the researchers have given robots the ability to have almost human fingertips and dexterity to grab objects. The Baxter robot, above, uses its own vision system to identify the USB socket, computing the position and lightly guiding the plug into the console, with the light touch of a human being.

"The sensor is an adaptation of a technology called GelSight," said Larry Hardesty in an MIT news release, and unlike an earlier version of the sensor this iteration comes in a smaller (fingerprint) size.

"The new sensor isn't as sensitive as the original GelSight sensor, which could resolve details on the micrometer scale. But it's smaller—small enough to fit on a robot's gripper—and its processing algorithm is faster," he said.

According to the researchers, this is an unprecedented robotic capability. While industrial grade robots can perform similar tasks "when the objects they're manipulating are perfectly positioned in advance," they write, this version self identifies the socket, then gracefully completes inserting the USB plug, all on its own, using advanced optics and computer-vision algorithms.

First they're plugging in USBs. What next?