Virginia Tech Develops Robotic Hand for Typing

DART developed and created by Nicholas Thayer and Shashank Priya of Virginia Tech is a dexterous anthropomorphic robotic typing hand.

Normally robotic hands were mainly used for simple manipulation or grasping but now it could buy a drink from a vending machine or type dexterously. Both of them have diligently studied the human hand to understand it thoroughly, especially how it could type on keyboard keys throughout the day. This study has been published very recently in an issue of Smart Materials and Structures.

It is not easy to replicate a body part, which contains 40 muscles and can control 23 degrees of freedom. It’s not just attaching the joints in the right places but what was needed was to know how and when to restrict the joints and to know, which joint is to be used. DART has achieved 19° of freedom out of the total 23, which is sufficient for fulfilling its primary objectives. It is going to be utilized by humanoid robots, which would assist elderly people to operate computers and other machines by giving them voice commands. In the future these robotic hands would be attached to life like fleshy coverings and then they would resemble the human hand a great deal.