Japanese team develops world's largest 'bio-mixing' manipulator
A Japanese research team says it has developed a robotic hand that uses cultured human muscle tissue to move, the largest of its kind ever developed, and hopes to apply the technology to prosthetic hands.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University say the biohybrid hand has five fingers that can move individually using multiple joints and can perform complex finger movements such as grabbing and moving the tips of small objects. Its length is 18 cm including the forearm section.
Previous biohybrid devices were only capable of single-joint movements and were limited in size to around 1 cm because the thick muscle tissue used to move larger limbs suffered tissue loss as nutrients did not reach the center.
The team solved this problem by tying multiple thin strands of muscle tissue together into a sushi roll to act as a larger muscle. Because this design ensures nutrients reach each string, the tissues are strong enough to allow the robotic arm to move.
Shoji Takeuchi, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Tokyo, said this research paves the way for improving the muscle strength of biohybrid robot hands.
"This could lead to human-like robots or sophisticated prosthetics," Takeuchi said.
The team’s findings were published on February 12 in the journal Science Robotics.
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