Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a robotic hand that can detect touch and recognize an object after just one grasp in a recent study that will be presented at the RoboSoft Conference. This new robotic “skin” advances earlier research on robot touch perception, although earlier work required robots to grip objects more than once or was limited in its ability to learn as much about the object it is grabbing.“Having both soft and rigid elements is very important in any hand, but so is being able to perform great sensing over a really large area, especially if we want to consider doing very complicated manipulation tasks like what our own hands can do.