Soft robotic finger with a sophisticated sense of touch

Robotists have designed, manufactured and tested a soft robotic finger whose high tactile sensitivity will allow it to perform medical examinations, such as taking a patient’s pulse or palpating their body to detect suspicious lumps.

This advance is the work of a team led by Yufeng Wang, from the University of Science and Technology of China.

A robot whose hands have fingers like this could help doctors detect diseases such as breast cancer early, when they are most treatable.

Through further development to improve its efficiency, it is feasible that a hand made of fingers like this could act as a ‘robotic doctor’ in a hospital or healthcare facility, Hongbo Wang of the research and development team believes. In combination with machine learning (a form of artificial intelligence), a robot can be made to autonomously perform medical examinations and make diagnoses based on what it finds, something that is especially beneficial for areas where there is a serious shortage of healthcare personnel. , as Wang argues.

Robotic fingers with a significant level of dexterity have existed for a long time. However, they are hard and have many rigid parts, making them potentially too rough for the delicate human body contact tasks required in a medical examination.

More recently, soft, flexible robots have been created capable of interacting with the human body without risk of damaging it. However, these devices have not been able to perceive the complex properties of the objects they touch, unlike what real human fingers allow.

The new soft robotic finger has achieved this now.

Prototype of the new soft robotic finger. (Photo: Yufeng Wang. CC BY-SA)

We humans can easily recognize the rigidity of various objects. To do this, all we have to do is press them with a finger. Similarly, as the new soft robotic finger has the ability to sense both its bending deformation and the force at the fingertip, it can detect, by simply lightly pressing an object, its degree of rigidity. This capacity is similar to that of the human hand.

In addition to taking the pulse and detecting abnormal body lumps, the robotic finger can write like a human hand does, researchers have found.

By using additional sensors and with greater flexibility in the joints of the robotic finger, allowing the device to move in multiple directions like a human finger, a robotic hand capable of performing effective and efficient medical examinations could be achieved in the near future. . “We hope to develop an intelligent and agile hand, along with a sensorized robotic arm powered by artificial muscles, to emulate the unparalleled functionality and precision of human hands,” says Wang.

Wang and his colleagues present the technical details of the new robotic finger in the academic journal Cell Reports Physical Science, under the title “Toward Human-Like Touch Sense via a Bioinspired Soft Finger with Self-Decoupled Bending and Force Sensing.” (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)