Scientists Bring The Sense Of Touch To A Robotic Arm

A robotic arm with a sense of touch has allowed a man who is paralyzed to quickly perform tasks like pouring water from one cup into another.

The robotic arm provides tactile feedback directly to the man's brain as he uses his thoughts to control the device, a team reports Thursday in the journal Science.

Previous versions of the arm required the participant, Nathan Copeland, to guide the arm using vision alone.

"When I only had visual feedback, I could see that the hand had touched the object," Copeland says. "But sometimes I would go to pick it up and it would fall out."

A typical grasping task also took Copeland about 20 seconds to complete. "With sensory feedback he was able to complete it in 10," says Jennifer Collinger, an associate professor in the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Pittsburgh.

Tactile information is important for using a robotic arm of limb prosthesis because it's hard to grasp an object you can't feel, Collinger says.