‘I’ll have you eating out of the palm of my hand” is an unlikely utterance you’ll hear from a robot. Why? Most of them don’t have palms.

If you have kept up with the protean field, gripping and grasping more like humans has been an ongoing, Herculean effort. Now, a new robotic hand design developed in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has come to grips with the oft-overlooked palm. The new design uses advanced sensors for a highly sensitive touch, helping the “extremity” handle objects with more detailed and delicate precision.

GelPalm has a gel-based, flexible sensor embedded in the palm, inspired by the soft, deformable nature of human hands. The sensor uses a special color illumination technology that includes red, green, and blue LEDs to light an object, and a camera to capture reflections. This mixture generates detailed 3D surface models for precise robotic interactions.

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