Teenager builds advanced robot hand entirely from Lego pieces
Jared Lepora with his robot hand built from Lego Mindstorms pieces
Nathan Lepora
A robotic hand built from Lego pieces by a 16-year-old and his father can grasp and move objects, displaying qualities similar to those of a prominent anthropomorphic hand.
Jared Lepora, a student at Bristol Grammar School, UK, began developing his hand at the age of 14 with his father, Nathan Lepora, who works at the University of Bristol.
The device borrows principles from leading researchers, including Pisa/IIT SoftHand, but uses only commercially available parts from Lego Mindstorms, a line of educational kits for building programmable robots.
“My dad is a professor of robotics at the University of Bristol and I really liked the designs [of robotic hands]”, says Jared. “It just inspired me to do it in an educational format and in Lego.”
The hand is driven by two motors using tendons, and each of its four fingers has three joints. A differential made from Lego clutch gears connects the figures so that they move together until they touch an object and then stop moving, similar to how humans grip objects.
During tests, the Lego hand managed to grab nine household items, including a plastic cup and bowl, as well as a soft toy weighing 0.8 kilograms.
A single finger of the hand can fully close in about 0.84 seconds and open in 0.97 seconds, about half as fast as a 3D printed equivalent of the Pisa/IIT SoftHand using metal bearings. In static testing, a finger from the Lego hand could support 5 newtons of load and push 6 newtons of weight, and had 1.8 newtons of closing force, compared to 8 newtons of carrying force, 7 newtons of pushing force, and 2 newtons of closing force for the 3D printed version.
“You’ll never have a hand this good [as a 3D-printed hand] in terms of capabilities with a Lego hand,” Nathan explains. The Lego hand is also significantly larger: each of the four digits measures 145 millimeters long and 30 millimeters wide.
The Lego Mindstorms were discontinued in 2022, but Jared says the device can still be updated with different Lego pieces. “The way I implemented the motors, they can easily be removed and newer motors can be added,” he says.
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