The Making Of Sophia: Hardware Engineering for Arms and Hands - Hanson Robotics

Social robots living and working with humans must be able to navigate environments never designed for use by robots. Arms and hands are a vital tool for robots to manipulate common everyday objects, like door handles, pens, keyboards, or switches, not to mention giving humans handshakes or high-fives! Hands are also an essential means of communicating between people. They can be used as nonverbal shortcuts, like giving a thumbs up, or as a means to express a variety of different emotions. By having a human-like hand design, social robots can take advantage of these many nonverbal cues humans use to communicate.