by thenewgreen

According to SynTouch co-founder and head of business development Matt Borzage, it's a matter of speed. "With humans, our hands need to make thousands of adjustments per second when holding something. If it starts to slip, to send that information all the way up to the brain and all the way back down the arm takes too long. That's why the spinal cord is connected to the arm," says Borzage. For a robot hand to achieve that level of human-like precision, and avoid constant fumbling, it has to act independently. Waiting for an operator to receive a haptic signal, process it, and send back a command is a recipe for halting, klutzy failure. "It's why we need to implement some low-level reflexes into the robotic arm that mimic that spinal cord level reflex," says Borzage.