NASA podcast discusses Ability Hand

The deputy team lead of NASA's dexterous robotics team talked about the Ability Hand recently in this conversation about their Valkyrie robot.

Listen to the entire podcast, or here’s an excerpt…

Evan Laske: And there are others that have brought humanoid-like things to bear. In fact, IHC’s partner, has built their own humanoid-like robot. What’s interesting about that is we’ve looked at actually the prosthetics industry. The prosthetics industry has been looking at how to give people more dexterity. Again, dexterous robotics team. And we actually found a commercial product that is an order of magnitude cheaper than the bill of materials of a Valkyrie hand.
Host: Interesting.

Evan Laske: But it’s commercially available.

Host: Wow.

Evan Laske: And we were able to basically buy one, put it on Valkyrie and see how it performed.

Host: Let’s try it, a commercial off-the-shelf hand.

[Laughs]

Evan Laske: Yes, exactly. Exactly. It’s pretty great. Five fingers and everything.