Research labs
Centro di Ricerca Enrico Piaggio
Italy
The hand's adaptive-synergy design won the best paper award at Humanoids 2012 and is commercialised as the qbhand by qbrobotics, a spin-off of Centro Piaggio and IIT; the SoftHand 2 adds a second motor to reach in-hand manipulation.
AffiliationUniversità di Pisa, Scuola di Ingegneria
CountryIT
TypeAcademic
Research areassoft robotics, robotic hands and haptics, variable stiffness actuation, embedded control, bioengineering
Flagship contributionDesigned the Pisa/IIT SoftHand with IIT: an anthropomorphic hand driven by a single motor whose grasp posture emerges from contact with the object instead of being commanded, released as open hardware under the Natural Machine Motion Initiative.
Key peopleAntonio Bicchi (professeur, robotique et bioingénierie), Manolo Garabini (professeur, robotique douce)
Open outputsPisa/IIT SoftHand en matériel ouvert (Natural Machine Motion Initiative) et dépôt CentroEPiaggio/pisa-iit-soft-hand sur GitHub — paquets ROS et modèles de simulation Gazebo sous licence BSD 3-Clause.
CityPise
Sources: Centro di Ricerca Enrico Piaggio, Università di Pisa (2026-09-03)Centro di Ricerca Enrico Piaggio, Università di Pisa (2026-09-03)GitHub (CentroEPiaggio) (2026-09-03)
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