Open Innovation & Robot Evolution

The human hand is Nature’s most dexterous end-effector. It’s sensory and motor capabilities endow it with unique properties and a degree of specialization that is of paramount importance for the execution of everyday life tasks. This mechanical dexterity is nowadays recognized as a key characteristic that facilitated the development of a superior brain by Homo sapiens. In the field of robotics, we are still struggling to equip robots with humanlike grasping and manipulation capabilities. In this talk, I will discuss how the robot hands dexterity affects the evolution of robots and how open innovation could trigger a robot revolution.

Participants:
Minas Liarokapis, Founder of the OpenBionics Initiative

Minas was born in Athens in 1984. He received the Diploma in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, the MSc degree in Information Technologies in Medicine and Biology from the National Kapodistrian University of Athens and the PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate for two years at Yale University. Currently, he is a Lecturer at the University of Auckland and Director of the New Dexterity Lab . His research focuses on human robot interaction, human and robot dexterity, robot grasping and manipulation, robot hands design, the design of assistive and human augmentation devices and on the development of non-invasive brain machine interfaces. He is the founder of the OpenBionics initiative and a co-founder of HandCorpus and OpenRobotHardware.
OpenBionics Initiative