According to reports, a new robotic model that has been created by scientists, together with an Indian-origin engineering student, is able to adjust its hold on objects. For instance, if a robotic gripper wants to pick up a pencil at its midpoint, but holds the eraser end in its place, it could adjust its grasp by using the environment.

The new model allows a robot to loosen its hold to some extent and try again in place of releasing the pencil, and it also pushes the pencil close to a nearby wall. It slides the robot's gripper nearer to the midpoint of the pencil.

The model has been developed by a group of researchers led by Alberto Rodriguez, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), together with graduate student Nikhil Chavan-Dafle. The model helps predict the force with which a robotic gripper has to push against different fixtures in the environment for adjusting its hold on an object.

It is an approach named as "extrinsic dexterity" by Rodriguez, in which robots are partnered with the environment in order to improve dexterity. It is opposite to what is considered as the intrinsic dexterity of the human hand. A person, by making use of one hand, can spider-crawl his fingers in the direction of the centre of the pencil to adjust his grip.

According to Rodriguez, "Chasing the human hand is still a very valid direction in robotics. But if you cannot afford having a $100,000 hand that is very complex to use, this method brings some dexterity to very simple grippers”.