Sankar revealed that each of the hands‘ soft air-filled finger joints can be controlled with the forearm’s muscles, and machine learning algorithms focus the signals from the artificial touch receptors to create a realistic sense of touch.
“The sensory information from its fingers is translated into the language of nerves to provide naturalistic sensory feedback through electrical nerve stimulation,” Sankar said.
The researchers revealed that they combined the strengths of both rigid and soft robotics to mimic the human hand.
Sankar underlined that the human hand isn’t completely rigid or purely soft—it’s a hybrid system, with bones, soft joints, and tissue working together. That’s what we want our prosthetic hand to achieve.