Pizza chefs help improve robots' dexterity

London, July 25 (ANI): A group of Japanese engineers has turned to an unlikely source of inspiration to boost robots' dexterity: a pizza parlour.

"An Italian chef dextrously manipulates a pizza in an oven using a tool called a pizza peel," says Makoto Kaneko, the team's leader at Osaka University.

The peel of a pizza includes little more than a flat blade tied to the end of a long pole, but it gives the chef a degree of control over the pizza. Based on a pizza peel, Kaneko's team has designed a robotic hand that allows robots to exert similar control.

A pizza chef can only move the peel with two degrees of freedom - back-and-forth and by twisting the pole. Yet the two motions in combination can be used to provide an extra degree of freedom and rotate the pizza horizontally, reports New Scientist.

Interestingly, Osaka team's robot "hand" has the same capability.

This allows the robot to manipulate an object with great precision.

The study will be published in IEEE Transactions in Robotics. (ANI)