This Pittsburgh Company Is Building A Robotic Hand For The U.S. Navy To Safely Defuse Mines

Human touch is an amazing sense, and the human hand is an incredible tool. We can pinch feathers and heave dumbbells. We can grip rough rocky cliffs, gently hold raw eggs, and discern tiny, molecular-level differences in surfaces. And we can hit a nail on the head with precision, manipulate 50-pound boxes, or gently tap on a smartphone.

Can a robotic hand ever get as good?

“Absolutely. It’s just a matter of time,” says Jorgen Pederson, chief operating officer of Sarcos Robotics, in a recent TechFirst podcast.

With partners at UCLA and the University of Washington, Sarcos is building STARFISH, a human-like robotic hand that the US Navy can use to investigate, detach, and defuse underwater mines or improvised explosive devices. The idea is that a Navy expert will eventually be able to “feel” the object the robotic hand is touching while remaining safely distant from any potential explosion.

“We are developing a conformable underwater hand that has the ability to feel,” Pederson says. “It’s providing this conformable grasp where you can feel, and this is really important if you think of some of the tasks that Navy divers are asked to do. Often they’re in turbid waters where your visibility is limited.”

STARFISH is short for “Strong Tactile mARitime hand for Feeling, Inspecting, Sensing and Handling,” because — of course — every military project needs a long, complicated name that resolves to a friendly acronym. Dr. Veronica Santos at UCLA and University of Washington professor Jonathan Posner are developing some of the basic science, and Sarcos is implementing it in real-world robotics. To successfully complete the project, the company will have to meld at least four distinct but related technologies: the ability to “feel” a surface, the ability to understand, at some machine level, what it is that the robot is touching, the ability to manipulate and move it in complex ways, and the ability to relay all of this to a distant human operator.

Navy personnel ideally are in the loop to provide human-level insight and guidance, but that might not always be possible.

So Sarcos is designing the robotic hand with a certain level of autonomy.

“Where we’re moving towards is the concept of supervised autonomy, where you’re pushing more of the thinking, the AI, the software, down onto the platform and letting it close the loop,” says Pederson. “You can have a very tight control loop locally with the robot. And then you’re just providing higher level feedback commands to the operator and seeking guidance on how to move forward with the mission.”

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Defusing, of course, might be out of the question. That’s already hard enough on land under controlled circumstances with world-class experts. The ocean, however, is anything but controlled.

So Sarcos is also designing the system to be able to autonomously swim to the general area in which a threat has been detected, find it, attach an explosive device to it, arm that explosive device, and then “render it safe,” as Pederson says, from a reasonable distance. The US Navy awarded the company a $9.5 million contract in 2021 for the program, called the Maritime Mine Neutralization System.

Non-military uses of the same technology, however, include maintenance of complex offshore infrastructure for the oil and gas industry. That includes tasks like weld inspection on oil rigs, mooring inspection and measurement. and valve inspection and manipulation, the company says.

The interesting part, of course, is building something of an analog to a human hand.

While it does not necessarily need to be anthropomorphic or have five fingers, Pederson says, it does need to be conformable so that it can handle nonstandard situations, tools, and objects. STARFISH currently has three fingers, and currently they are precise enough to grasp a pair of tweezers as well as larger, heavier objects. It also has “multimodal tactile sensor skin that enables the grippers’ sensorized fingertips to feel normal and shear forces.” the company says.

Elon Musk and Tesla, of course, are trying to go even farther with the Tesla Bot, due to be revealed at the company’s upcoming “AI Day” on September 30. Tesla Bot is, the company says, “the next generation of automation … a general purpose, bi-pedal, humanoid robot capable of performing tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring.”

Fully humanoid robots are probably fairly far-fetched with today’s technology, according to at least one MIT roboticist I’ve chatted with.

But building at least some human-level capability into our robots is essential.

“What we’re trying to achieve is getting to that true humanlike capability,” says Pederson. “To perform those more challenging tasks, you need to start incorporating more humanlike capabilities and one of those is that ability to feel, right … touch is also a very powerful sense that needs to be incorporated to take us to the next level, and that’s exactly what we’re endeavoring to solve.”

To date, Sarcos has achieved at least building the STARFISH hand and successfully testing it. Next up, the company says, are actual sea trials.

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