Tacta Systems takes aim at high-skilled manufacturing work with TactaBot

Tacta’s robotic hand comes in three- and five-finger configurations. | Source: Tacta Systems

Tacta Systems last week launched the TactaBot, which includes the company’s Tacta Hand, Skill Capture system, and a Dexterous Intelligence AI model. These three components work together to create capable, scalable, and adaptable robotic hands for high-value work.

“We have vison-only robots and a variety of different robots that do really good work today, which is moving objects and so on, but the holy grail is to be able to augment, complement, and expand the potential to use robots to do high value work,” Vikram Pavate, co-founder and CEO of Tacta Systems, told The Robot Report .

Pavate said some of the biggest workforce shortages in the world have to do with skilled labor, particularly in manufacturing environments.

“Humans have amazing brains, but AI is catching up,” he noted. “We have decent eyes, and that’s an area where computer vision, arguably, has caught up. The parts that have been missing are the hands.”

Tacta identified this problem three years ago when the company started. “For high-value work, we need our robotic hands to be able to touch and feel the real world,” Pavate said. “They need to be able to feel normal force, shear force, contact, deformation, slip, temperature, texture, surfaces.”

Tacta offers a dexterous, human-sized gripper with five fingers, and 15 degrees of freedom (DoF), three per finger. Each finger can lift up to 25 newtons of force, which is about 2.5 kg (5.5 lb.) in each fingertip, Pavate said.

The hand use Tacta’s proprietary Fluidic Tendon actuation technology. Pavate said the system features cables with fluids moving through them to push pistons to move the fingers.

“That allows us to make the fingers very, very thin,” Pavate said. “There’s no heat generated anywhere close to the hand. This allows us to maintain incredible stability and precision that we would not be able to achieve with motor-driven hands.”

He added that the robotic hand is more reliable than cable-driven hands. These can be precise and fast, but if one cable goes out, the whole hand breaks down. The Tacta hand can last up to 30 million cycles. claimed Pavate.

Tacta’s robotic hand and its glove capture system both use its tactile sensor . Smaller than a grain of sand, each sensor recognizes the full dynamic range of human touch from 250 pascals to 700,000 pascals. The sensors can also measure temperature with a precision of 0.1 degrees centigrade