The Bionic Soft Hand is pneumatically operated so that it can interact safely and directly with people. Its fingers consist of flexible bellows structures with air chambers. The bellows in the fingers are enclosed by a special 3D textile sheath, which is knitted from both elastic and high-strength threads. This allows the textile to determine exactly where the structure expands and thus develops force and where it is prevented from expanding. This makes it light, flexible, adaptable and sensitive, but still able to exert strong forces.

The Bionic Soft Hand uses the reinforcement learning method. This means that instead of a specific action that it has to imitate, the hand is simply given a goal. It tries to achieve this by trial and error. Based on the feedback it receives, it gradually optimizes its actions until it finally solves the task successfully.

To minimize the amount of tubing required for the hand, the developers have designed a small, digitally controlled valve terminal that is attached directly underneath the hand. This means that the hoses for controlling the fingers do not have to be pulled through the entire robot arm. This means that the Soft Hand can be connected and put into operation with just one hose each for supply air and exhaust air. The proportional piezo valves used allow the movements of the fingers to be precisely controlled.

One robot arm, many possible variations
The strict separation between human work and the automated actions of robots is increasingly being abolished. Their work areas are merging into a collaborative workspace in which robots that can be flexibly adapted will be in particular demand. With the Bionic Soft Arm, a flexible, pneumatic robot arm, humans and machines will in future be able to work on the same workpiece at the same time without having to be shielded from each other.

The Soft Arm is a compact further development of the Bionic Motion Robot from Festo, whose range of applications has been extended. This is made possible by its modular design: it can be combined with up to seven pneumatic bellows segments and rotary drives. This gives it maximum flexibility in terms of reach and mobility and allows it to work around obstacles in the tightest of spaces if required. At the same time, it is inherently compliant and can work safely with humans. Direct human-robot collaboration is just as possible with the Bionic Soft Arm as its use in classic Scara applications, such as pick-and-place tasks. as