Dexterous robots now get 'touchy-feely'

A new study has revealed about the first time development of a fingertip sensor technology that gives robot dexterity.

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northeastern University have equipped a robot with a novel tactile sensor, which is an adaptation of a technology called GelSight, that lets it grasp a USB cable draped freely over a hook and insert it into a USB port.

The new sensor isn't as sensitive as the original GelSight sensor, which was developed by the lab of Edward Adelson, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science at MIT, and first described in 2009, that could resolve details on the micrometer scale.

But the new sensor is smaller, small enough to fit on a robot's gripper, and its processing algorithm is faster, so it can give the robot feedback in real time.

According to researcher Robert Platt, people have been trying to do this for a long time and they haven't succeeded because the sensors they're using aren't accurate enough and don't have enough information to localize the pose of the object that they're holding.

The study was presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.