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To complete many everyday tasks and chores, humans typically use both of their hands. For instance, when opening a bottle, they use one hand to hold the bottle and the other to twist its cap. Researchers at the University of California San Diego recently developed EgoThumb, a robotic thumb that could allow people to complete some tasks that generally require both hands using only one.

Their proposed robotic system, introduced in a preprint posted on arXiv, captures images with a small camera, which are then analyzed by an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm trained to plan the thumb's movements.

"The initial inspiration came from soldering wires," Jiawei Fu, co-first author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.

"Between handling the soldering iron, feeding solder, applying flux and keeping the wires in place, I often felt I needed an extra hand. Even with a 'helping hands' stand, coordinating everything could still be awkward. That made me wonder whether a wearable robotic finger could help hold objects while leaving my own fingers free to work."

Fu and his colleagues set out to develop a compact, wearable robotic system that could serve as an extra thumb to hold objects in place while a wearer's fingers manipulate them. In addition, they wanted the thumb to autonomously determine when to grasp and release objects using images of the wearer's hand and nearby objects, along with information about the thumb's joint positions.

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