Sanctuary AI’s hydraulic actuation brings human-level dexterity to general-purpose robots

Sanctuary AI, a company on a mission to create human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots, has achieved a technological milestone on its path to mission success. The company shares in a press statement that its 21 degrees of freedom (DOF) dexterous robotic hands can perform in-hand manipulation, which opens up a wide range of industrial fine manipulation tasks.

The company explains that its approach to making dexterous robotic hands is enabled by its unique miniaturized hydraulic valves. This method of hydraulic actuation offers an order of magnitude higher power density than cable and electromechanical-based systems, providing dexterous capability as it relates to speed, strength, controllability, cycle life, impact resistance and heat management.

“Demonstrating in-hand manipulation with a scalable and reliable system is a key milestone towards demonstrating the breadth and viability of capable general-purpose robots. Dexterous capability is directly proportional to the size of the addressable market for general-purpose humanoid robots,” says James Wells, interim CEO and chief commercial officer at Sanctuary AI. “Our ambition is to build a reliable system with human-level dexterity. We have also recently achieved a milestone of testing our hydraulic valve actuators over 2 billion cycles without any signs of leakage or degradation.”

Dexterous developments on Sanctuary AI’s general purpose robot, Phoenix, help further train the AI control system, Carbon. The enriched behavioural data from this new level of dexterity provides Carbon with deeper insights into how to interact with the world, says the company. Both Carbon and Sanctuary AI’s dexterous robotic hands are designed in a modular format, enabling future partnerships and integrations with both non-humanoid and humanoid general-purpose robots.