Fingers that feel: RAI Institute shows robot hands that catch and throw balls
A new video from the US research institute explains the touch sensors of the two-armed robot AthenaZero. Its tendon-driven fingers close in about 80 milliseconds.
Photo: NearEMPTiness / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Video: YouTube · RAI Institute · youtube.com
The RAI Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has released a new video about its research robot AthenaZero. The focus is on the hands' touch sensors: each palm holds eight and each fingertip three pressure-sensitive sensors that take measurements 200 times per second. According to the team's paper, they locate a touch to within about three millimetres with a force resolution of around 0.1 newtons.
Each hand has three fingers moved by thin tendons made of the synthetic fibre Dyneema. The motors sit not in the hand but in the torso, with force transmitted through 1.8-metre cable drives. That keeps the arms light and fast: the fingers close in about 80 milliseconds and wrap around objects ranging from an egg to a hammer.
AthenaZero is a stationary two-armed robot, not a walking humanoid. In tests it threw a tennis ball at just over 30 metres per second and caught baseballs at up to about 18 metres per second, though reliably only up to around 13 metres per second. No data on the long-term durability of the cable drives is available yet, and no product has been announced.