Closing the grip loop with tactile skin

Grasping is deceptively hard. A gripper strong enough to lift a full tote will crush an egg, unless it can feel what it's holding and react in milliseconds. Our answer pairs back-drivable, quasi-direct-drive actuation with a tactile skin across each fingertip.

Because the joints back-drive, the hand is compliant by default — it gives instead of clamping. The tactile array then closes the loop, detecting incipient slip and adjusting grip force continuously from a tenth of a newton up to a hundred and twenty.

The result is one controller that spans the whole range of everyday objects. No fixtures, no jigs, no swapping end-effectors between tasks — just a hand that feels its way to the right amount of force.