A growing group of engineers think future robotic explorers are badly in need of a hand. Allison Okamura, founder of Johns Hopkins University's new Haptic Exploration Lab is one of the researchers who want to give robots the gift of touch. Vision, like hearing, is a passive sense. You can look at something without affecting it. Yet researchers have still had a hell of a time getting robots to understand what they are seeing and react accordingly.
Touch is harder still.
In order to truly touch something, a robot has to do more than just hold it. It has to feel and manipulate it with an appropriate degree of force. Soft Touch One of those pushing hardest for more sensitive robotic hands is Okamura's former doctoral thesis supervisor and Professor of Engineering at the Stanford University, Mark Cutkosky. He became obsessed with the idea of more capable robot hands after working on hulking, clumsy industrial bots in the early 1980s. Without touch a robot could not adjust its grasp to the varying size, shape, surface, position and strength of different objects.