Lab Research

Tired of your toy gripper?

Without thumb opposition we are put back 60 million years in evolutionary terms. Replicate the marvelous functions of the human hand: grasping, manipulation, sensing and non-verbal communication. Whether your goal is to complement visual servoing with an end effector, or to pick and place objects with a (non)humanoid robot, to tele-operate a remote gripper while receiving tactile information, or even teach your students basics of controls and sensing, IH2 is just the right tool for you.

Having four fingers and an opposable thumb, IH2 is capable of replicating the three main grasps of human hands: i.e. precision, power and lateral grasps, under force closed-loop control. IH2 performs a set of actions, including pre-programmed stereotypical grasps, triggered by commands sent over a USB or Bluetooth link.

With 5 independent movements, tactile sensors and its real-time embedded controller IH2 will foster your research faster than ever.

Courtesy of DLR and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna

The cognitive tool in humans

Due to its connection with the brain the hand is probably the most important cognitive tool of our body. With hands humans manipulate, experience and sense the environment, thus acquiring knowledge and understanding of it. Our robotic hands and touch sensors albeit simplified copies of the biological counterparts, are perhaps the best end effectors in experimental studies investigating artificial intelligence, active and reinforcement learning, autonomous reasoning.

Assess on a physical platform the ability of a robotic agent to adapt to changes of the environment and to evolve under the effects of external stimuli. Demonstrate learning strategies and brain models using our dexterous hands with touch sensors.

Where to start? Our hands are available with wrists for a wide range of robotic arms (e.g. Kuka, Universal Robots), so plugin IH2 into your setup using either USB or Bluetooth and start building a new generation of autonomous robots.

What do we expect from robots?

The possibility of working in close collaboration with a robotic colleague is perhaps one of the most fascinating results that the world expects from the robotics research community. Flexible, capable and safe robots, namely, a new generation of industrial machines very different from the bulky and expensive manipulators existing today. Their flexibility, dexterity and perception system make Prensilia devices the ideal tools for pursuing these epochal challenges.

Develop interactive robotic companions that interact, assist, collaborate and help humans, sharing the same dynamics in unstructured environments. Assess on a physical platform your vision based intention detection algorithms. We have a long history of successful lab studies and our staff is ready to help setting up your experiment.

Courtesy of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna