ETH Zurich 将商用机械手改造成可自主行走的机器人

A hand attached to the end of an arm is a given for most humans, but what if robots didn’t have to play by the same rules as we do? Researchers from ETH Zurich have turned an off-the-shelf robotic hand into a completely self-contained robot that walks on its fingertips while using those same fingers to manipulate its environment. Besides making the perfect Halloween accessory for anyone planning to dress up as a member of the Addams Family—who were famously accompanied by a disembodied walking hand called Thing —this robotic hand could make it possible to operate controls and handle objects in places a traditional robot arm can’t reach, the researchers say. Soft Robotics Lab, ETH Zurich/YouTube Amirhossein Kazemipour , a Ph.D. candidate in the Soft Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich who led the project, believes this hand could prove useful in contexts like fiddly maintenance tasks in industrial settings, or in search and rescue, where a robot could detach its hand to explore confined spaces too tight for the rest of its body. More broadly, he says, the work is a step toward a new approach to robotics in which body parts are not confined to a single role. “I wanted to see how much a robotic hand could do without the rest of the robot,” Kazemipour told IEEE Spectrum . “Instead of having this traditional view of robotic parts, what if we could use those parts to do other tasks that they are not designed to do?” This is not the first attempt to get a robot hand to walk , but previous work has typically relied on specially designed hands. The ETH team instead decided to use off-the-shelf hardware from Wuji Technology , augmented with an 80-gram backpack containing a battery, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and a Raspberry Pi Zero. Kazemipour says they decided to go with a commercial robot hand because they didn’t want to compromise on the hand’s manipulation capabilities. This introduced significant challenges, he adds, because a hand’s shape is optimized for grasping rathe

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