Industrial robots are famously clumsy, great at moving car doors but terrible at picking up an egg. ABB Robotics thinks the solution is to learn from humans—specifically, from the data generated by advanced bionic hands worn by amputees. The automation giant has announced a collaboration with PSYONIC to use its sensor-packed Ability Hand to finally teach robots what a delicate touch feels like.
The plan is as elegant as it is unorthodox: mount the same bionic hand used by hundreds of people daily onto an ABB GoFa cobot. This creates a direct pipeline, feeding a torrent of real-world touch, pressure, and grip data from human users into the robot’s learning model. The goal is to train a new generation of “physical AI” that can handle the messy, unpredictable objects that have stumped automation for decades.
“Dexterous manipulation is ultimately a data challenge as much as a hardware challenge,” said Dr. Aadeel Akhtar, Founder and CEO of PSYONIC, in the official announcement. The Ability Hand, already used in research by the likes of NASA and Meta, is one of the most advanced prosthetics on the market, featuring haptic feedback that allows users to “feel” what they’re holding. By pairing this human-tested hardware with the industrial precision of ABB’s GoFa robot, the partnership aims to translate human instinct into reliable robotic performance.
Why is this important?
This is a direct assault on one of the biggest remaining hurdles in automation: handling anything that isn’t perfectly uniform. Most factory grippers are simple, dumb claws. Teaching a robot to handle fragile, irregular, or soft objects could unlock automation in agriculture, e-commerce fulfillment, and food processing—sectors that still rely heavily on human hands.
The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) estimates advanced gripping can slash engineering time by up to 30%, but the real prize is opening up entirely new markets. By essentially crowdsourcing dexterity data from prosthetic users, ABB and PSYONIC might just have found the ultimate cheat code to give robots a much-needed human touch.
