HRC Hand - Sigmoid

Replacing intensive labor with effortless grace

Delicate item handling and packing is still a labor-intensive manual job that is limiting the expansion and lowering the efficiency and throughput of the warehouses. Therefore, leading online grocery retail stores are pushing the development of robotics to automate their businesses.

However, commercially viable automated goods-picking, scanning and customer’s order packaging remain unsolved challenges, as, due to the lack of appropriate sensing abilities, the currently available grippers are specialized for certain types of items and cannot be used for a wide variety of grocery items. This was the perfect opportunity for our robotic experts to disrupt the market once again.

In good hands

Automating warehouses around the world and enabling online retailers to significantly reduce their costs and speed up their processes is a great challenge. That’s why we teamed up with the best:

High Tech Engineering Center (HTEC) is a company with a strong background in designing and development of end-to-end AI-enabled embedded solutions..

The Faculty of Technical Sciences (FTS) from Novi Sad is a home of a world-recognized robotic group which has all the human and infrastructural resources to support and supervise the design, manufacturing, and testing of prototypes..

The Faculty of Electronic Engineering (EF) from Niš offers its expertise in robot prototyping, embedded system design and control, with extended experience in mobile robotics and indoor localization.

The result – a robotic hand capable of grasping a large spectrum of items different in size, shape, and texture, mimicking human-level hand functionality.

Innovation at each
fingertip

The hand has two fingers with three degrees of freedom and the third finger is a thumb with four degrees of freedom and two different axes of rotation. This enables different types of grasps, adaptable to the shape of the object. While the whole hand, including the palm, is sensorized, the magic is in our force sensor, designed and prototyped at the Faculty of Technical Sciences Novi Sad. The force sensor, coated with a silicon cover, ensures high friction in contact with the objects and local passive compliance to the object’s shape. Even the smallest deformation of silicon cover is sensed and used to estimate the contact force. This approach combines the adaptability and sensitivity similar to the human fingertip.

Just the perfect amount
of sensitivity

Our touch sensor provides the perception of rigid shapes, adaptability to deformation and necessary responsiveness for grasping sensitive items. It is sensitive enough to support handling of fragile objects, but also possesses a measuring range to support power grasps of more robust and heavier objects.

Smooth operator

By developing an intuitive robot control software with a user-friendly interface, our robotic experts will enable operators, even without any technical background, to easily take matters into their own hands by selecting one of the predefined types of grasp (power grasp, precision grasp, pinch grasp, etc.) and defining the desired grasping force, based on the nature of the product.

Fast learner

By virtue of a state-of-the-art dual-mode control algorithm, the operators will easily guide the robot hand into the desired posture and around the object and teach it to grasp any unknown product of an arbitrary shape, size, and rigidness.

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