Skip to main content

Creepy Christmas carol: 3D-printed robotic hand plays ‘Jingle Bells’ on a piano

JingleBellsOverlay

Nothing says it’s nearly Christmas quite like a 3D-printed robot hand busting out a festive classic on the piano. Fortunately, this year the tradition continues (or, let’s be honest, starts) courtesy of researchers from the U.K.’s University of Cambridge. Using a 3D printer, they have created a soft robot hand — attached to a robot arm — that’s able to play the piano in a variety of styles, including clipped “staccato” and smooth “legato” notes. And what better way to showcase it than with a rendition of Jingle Bells?

Recommended Videos

While this isn’t the first piano-playing robot we’ve covered, what makes this robot neat is that it can achieve this fairly complex action despite being pretty limited in its movement. For instance, the hand is unable to move its fingers independently. That’s in stark contrast to the real human hand, which is capable of incredibly fine-grained motions thanks to its various points of articulation. The fact that it is therefore able to carry out actions as complicated as playing musical phrases on the piano is a testament to what can be achieved through some enterprising design. When it comes to this robot hand and its attached robot arm, the movement really is all in the wrist.

FabricationandFlexibility

“Creating robots which can manipulate objects as well as humans can is really challenging,” Josie Hughes, a researcher in Cambridge’s department of engineering, told Digital Trends. “We have explored how the physical structure of the hands — the bones and soft ligaments — provides some intelligence which enables this. By developing methods of 3D-printing a hand structure with soft and rigid components, we can then just actuate the robot hand, such that we can explore the passive behaviors of the hand as it interacts with the environment. This is a far more scalable approach than other approaches to developing complex robot hands, where many motors and really complex control is needed.”

The 3D-printed hand is just the latest in a growing number of “soft robotics,” which differ in material from the more rigid robots we might more typically associate with the word.

“We now want to take this work further to investigate how we can exploit this mechanical complexity of the hand, and how we can use this to enable robots to perform highly complex tasks which robots currently can’t perform,” Hughes said “To advance the technology further we also want to include tactile sensing into the hand — the human hand has an incredible sense of touch — and we want to include this in a robot hand.”

A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal Science Robotics.

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Printable wood biopaste could be the sustainable future of 3D printing
Biopaste 3D printing

 

Researchers at Germany’s University of Freiburg may have found a way to make 3D printing a bit more environmentally friendly -- by printing with a new material best described as a wood-based biopaste. After all, who needs boring, unsustainable plastics when you’ve got an alternative that works impressively well, made out of wood biopolymers cellulose and lignin?

Read more
This startup says it will be 3D-printing entire houses within a year
mighty buildings 3d print house 5

 

Is 3D printing the future of housebuilding? It certainly will be if new startup Mighty Buildings, which launched from stealth mode this week, has its way. The company builds houses rapidly using a giant 3D printer and proprietary 3D printing material that, unlike concrete, hardens almost immediately thanks to a UV light curing process. This technique allows it to create houses with 95% fewer labor hours and significantly less waste than traditional construction techniques, which could be a game-changer in the construction field.

Read more
Sebastian Stan lays out Bucky’s future after Thunderbolts
Sebastian Stan in Thunderbolts.

There are some spoilers ahead for the ending of Marvel's Thunderbolts. Stop reading now if you don't want to be spoiled.

Earlier this year, Captain America: Brave New World briefly introduced a new direction for James "Bucky" Barnes, a character Sebastian Stan has been playing since 2011 in Captain America: The First Avenger. In Brave New World, the former Winter Soldier apparently retired from being a reformed hero and went into politics by running for Congress. Thunderbolts reveals that Bucky won his election to the House of Representatives. But his stay in Congress was short.

Read more