Cyborg chic
Have you ever held a health-service standard prosthetic? They’re heavy, awkward, and very unattractive… In short, they often make their users feel much more disabled.

On finding this out, and realising that there are an estimated 2 million hand amputees worldwide who struggle with day-to-day activities, Open Bionics’ founder and CEO Joel Gibbard decided to put his lifelong hobby of building robotic hands to good use.
Since 2014, the Open Bionics team have been mastering dexterous robotic hands that are open source and 3D printable. Each prosthetic is fitted to its user, and can be printed using any number of existing designs — from Lego and Iron Man to Frozen and Deus Ex! They’re empowering their users to embrace being bionic, not to hide from it.
They’re currently working with the UK’s National Health Service on a clinical trial to see if their incredibly affordable and personalised tech can be prescribed as standard to amputees.
We went to visit Samantha, COO and Co-Founder, in their offices at the Bristol Robotics Lab (UK) to talk about the company’s journey, the potential of machine learning and whether robots are going to take over the world!

“Our devices have just been medically certified for use in the UK!” Samantha grins at us, “so now kids aged 8–18 are testing out the functionality of their own personalised limbs as part of a medical trial. We’ve already learnt so much about the different ways the bionics are being used — each kid uses grips in different ways.”
Just take a moment to think about how you hold a pen, type on your smartphone, and carry your shopping, and then watch how differently those around you do the same tasks. Hands are complex things. At the moment, EMG sensors attached to a user’s arm detect muscle movement, telling the bionic limb how quickly or firmly to squeeze its fingers. Depending on how muscles are used, different grips and finger movements can be triggered. Devices also feature a mechanical wrist so an amputee can change the angle of their hand, and a vibration motor lets the person know what grip movement they’re in and which fingers they’re using. The next big challenge is honing and improving this dexterity while ensuring the devices stay light weight — you want to have a functionality with the largest degree of freedom possible, but you also don’t want an excessive amount of motors and battery packs.
“I was sent a video of a 10-year-old girl who is participating in our trial. She’s lost both her hands, so was wearing two of our bionic limbs and spooning marshmallows onto a hot chocolate she’d made herself: it’s so cool knowing we’ve helped give her more independence and new movement.”
With this exceptionally advanced engineering, why are the limbs’ codes open source?
“We want everyone to be able to access our research so we can provide a platform for those within the industry to work from. The problem with our sector is that it’s slow to innovate as everything is patented — meaning innovation is often impeded. If you don’t share, everyone has to start from the baseline. We wanted to provide everyone with a robot hand that’s really easy to assemble, and pretty fast to print, so that they could play with it and develop additional tech to enhance the arms, from EMG sensors, force feedback, and machine learning — we just want the whole technology to leap forward.”
“It’s also really cool to see how people use them. We’ve had amputees 3D print them for their own use (even though these designs aren’t actually prosthetic hands). I’ve travelled to Dubai, Russia, Egypt, Japan and Singapore, and following my presentations, there’s been someone who comes over to tell me they’ve printed and used our hands.” People are really engaging with this tech, and there are cases of Open Bionic’s hands being used to test prosthetics in VR, to develop prosthetic control systems, made part of art projects, and even utlised for space applications — things that the team have neither the time nor money to focus on.
Download the code
The team is making huge leaps, and have just figured out how to use recycled plastic — such as milk and coke bottles — to 3D print their arms. On reflection, it’s incredible the advancements Open Bionics have made in such a short amount of time. “I remember getting into Disney’s Techstars programme 2 years ago,” said Samantha. “We had to go through something called Mentor Madness: for seven days you’re in room pitching to people from every single department you can imagine — from investors to commissioners and scriptwriters. One Disney director put us in touch with Cathy Kennedy, President of Lucas films, telling her that we wanted to build Luke Skywalker arms. She put us in touch with her team of artists and just made it happen!”


Going forward, it’s clear that there are lots of applications for the tech, and Samantha is determined to push the technology as far as it can go. But firstly, the team plans to address the needs and wants of the amputee community, and solve immediate engineering challenges such as sensory feedback. They’re also working with some surgeons on targeted muscle reinnervation, considering the potential of under-the-skin sensors.
In the field of robotics, there are huge areas of potential, and Samantha would love to see more important real-world applications for robots: “I haven’t seen any amazing robots in the home, and it’s sad when you go to tech shows where robotic products are like the robot grill, it’s quite well built but ultimately it’s just robot that cleans barbecue grills … come on guys! I want to see more human robot interaction, in doctors surgeries and using AI to help cure illnesses, for instance. I think there has to be a big leap forward for us to see robots in everyday life.”
There are lots of discussions around robots and ethics at the moment, especially in the wake of the Facebook AI robot that was shut down, but in actual fact, the media have a big responsibility when it comes to how the public perceives robotics and AI. “Facebook shut down the AI because it wasn’t improving up on the task anymore, but at the moment journalists love scary headlines about how robots are going to ruin the world and take our jobs, but it’s just not the case. Yes, there needs to be some universal ethical guidelines around what you can and can’t do, as with the medical sector, and now is the time for these policies to be developed.”
It’s also key for policy makers and government officials to look at, and report on, the impact of that automation of jobs, as there are a lot of ethical problems that aren’t being addressed and the fear of the unknown if causing resistance and fear, which isn’t what robotics should be doing.
“We need to build a new ecosystem, a new economy where robots are doing manual labour and giant data crunching tasks, and humans are free to be creative and earn that way, or have universal basic income. Something has to happen, and we need to be talking about it now proactively rather than retroactively. There are lots of different ways robots can contribute to society, and there’s lots of different ways robots can look after people.”
Robotics paranoia needs be be mitigated with stories of the potential for robotics. Creators like Samantha and her team at Open Bionics have made it clear that we want to use robots to make things better for us as humans, and not to build robots to take over the world.
Robots are already helping people — from AI for drug discovery to robots preventing the elderly from being lonely — and future possibilities for the tech are even more inspiring and exciting.
Authored by: Emily McDonnell, Global Head of Community, CUBE
Open Bionics are currently recruiting for a number of positions, including a Community Manager and Software Engineer.
Samantha Payne spoke on a panel titled “Coffee with Robots” at the CUBE Tech Fair 2017; watch the whole talk here.
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