Prosthetic Hand Tech and ABB Robots Learning to Grip

A prosthetic hand has to do the job robot grippers still find hardest: pick up a cup, a key or a soft piece of fruit and hold it with the right force. In 2026 the two fields moved closer. ABB Robotics began testing a bionic hand built for amputees on its GoFa cobot, and the hand's maker now wants to pay prosthetic users for the grip data they produce every day. This post follows the prosthetic hand from the split hook to myoelectric and bionic hands, then looks at this year's trials, what ABB is doing with them, and what the shared work could mean for homes and factories.

Two ABB GoFa cobots fitted with PSYONIC Ability Hands, one holding a torque wrench on a metal drive housing. Photo: ABB

From iron hands to split hooks and electric fingers

Replacement hands are old. The German knight Götz von Berlichingen wore an iron hand made at the start of the 16th century. The design most amputees used in the twentieth century came from David W. Dorrance, who had lost an arm in an accident and patented a split hook in 1912. Rubber bands held the two halves of the hook closed. A cable ran from the hook to a harness across the shoulders, so moving the shoulder pulled the hook open against the bands. Variations of this body-powered hook have stayed in use ever since, and Hosmer Dorrance still makes them.

A patient at Walter Reed General Hospital welds with an arm adapted for the torch, World War I era. Photo: National Museum of Health and Medicine / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

War pushed the field forward. At Walter Reed General Hospital in Washington, soldiers wounded in the First World War were fitted with arms adapted for trades such as acetylene welding as part of their occupational therapy. In 1945 the US Army set up a Prosthetics Research Laboratory to design artificial hands, arms, feet and legs, and its universal hand and voluntary closing hook went into production with private makers. Electric control came from the Soviet Union, which built the first myoelectric arm in 1958. Electrodes on the skin picked up the signals of muscles in the residual limb, and the first commercial version followed in 1964. In Roehampton, England, limb makers built arms powered by carbon dioxide gas in 1963.

Artificial arms powered by carbon dioxide gas, made in Roehampton, England, in 1963. Photo: Science Museum, London / Wellcome Images via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

For decades, powered hands moved their fingers together like a simple pinch. That changed in July 2007, when Touch Bionics, an Edinburgh company built on David Gow's work at the Princess Margaret Rose Hospital, launched the i-LIMB. It was the first commercially available hand with five individually powered fingers, and it could stop each finger once it had a firm grip. Össur bought the company in 2016. Cheaper hands came from another direction. In late 2012, South African carpenter Richard Van As and American prop maker Ivan Owen made the first 3D printed mechanical hand, and in January 2013 Owen put the design files online for anyone to print.

An i-LIMB hand in a museum display case in 2008, the year after its launch. Photo: Danie Ware / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Bionic hands in 2026 and the ABB GoFa link

This autumn brought two firsts in the United States. In September the University of Utah sent its LUKE Arm, a commercial prosthesis made by DEKA and joined to a direct nerve interface from the spin-off BIOS, home with a user for the first time. Avi Davidson, who lost his left arm below the elbow after a 35 foot fall at 16, will live with it for at least a year. He moves the arm by thinking, and it sends touch back to his nerves. Within days he was writing, playing cards and holding his wife's hand. The same week, Northwestern and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab reported the first US patient fitted with e-OPRA, a bionic arm anchored in the bone of his upper arm.

A brain-controlled prosthetic arm from DARPA-funded research at Johns Hopkins APL, shown by the FDA in 2011. Photo: JHU/APL via FDA / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The robotics link is PSYONIC, a San Diego company whose Ability Hand was designed for amputees. In June 2026 ABB Robotics said it was testing the hand on its GoFa CRB 15000 cobot. The Ability Hand combines myoelectric control, pressure sensors and flexible fingers that conform to odd shapes. The idea is to use touch and motion data from people who wear the hand to train robots for delicate, variable handling, with GoFa supplying the repeatable motion needed to compare one grip with another. Marc Segura, president of ABB Robotics, called human dexterity "one of the most difficult things to replicate in industrial-grade robotics". ABB lists automotive, aerospace, packaging and logistics, and life sciences among the industries it will explore.

A researcher at a laptop beside two ABB GoFa cobots fitted with PSYONIC Ability Hands. Photo: ABB

On September 30, Semafor reported the next step. PSYONIC wants to give bionic hands to amputees, looking first at Pakistan and India, and pay them to go about their day. Each hand logs the forces, torques and finger positions of every grip, synced with video from a wearable camera, and the company plans to sell the trained models to robot makers instead of the raw data. ABB users already work with grip sensing in simpler forms. The YuMi IRB 14000 can carry Smart Gripper modules that combine servo fingers, suction cups and a camera, and GoFa feels contact through torque sensors in its six joints. Our post on giving ABB robots a sense of touch explains how that force feedback works.

A GoFa cobot holds a torque wrench in an Ability Hand while a second hand reaches for the part. Photo: ABB

Where bionic hands and robot grippers go next

At home, the changes people notice will be price and feel. Van As started building his own hand after learning that a commercial prosthetic hand could cost $10,000 or more, and printed hands from the e-NABLE volunteer network grew out of that gap. Students keep adding to it; in September 2026 a West Virginia eighth grader made news for building a low-cost 3D printed bionic hand. Touch feedback is the harder problem. The Utah and Chicago trials will show whether nerve interfaces can work outside the lab for months at a time, which decides whether sensation ever reaches ordinary prosthetic users.

A 3D printed prosthetic hand photographed at the US Food and Drug Administration in 2015. Photo: U.S. Food and Drug Administration / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In factories, the payoff would be robots that handle soft, irregular or unfamiliar parts without a custom gripper for each one. ABB calls this goal Autonomous Versatile Robotics and cites an International Federation of Robotics estimate that better gripping and digital integration can cut engineering time by up to 30 percent. A GoFa with a five-finger hand could pick mixed parts from a bin or hold a hand tool, as ABB's test photos show, while the program around it is still planned and checked in RobotStudio. For now this is research. ABB has not announced a product that puts a prosthetic-style hand on its robots.

GoFa cobots with Ability Hands picking coloured blocks from a wooden box. Photo: ABB

The two fields also share their problems. Bionic hands are expensive and need a skilled prosthetist to fit them and train the user, and a five-finger robot hand has far more motors and sensors to maintain than a two-finger gripper. Paying amputees for grip data raises questions about consent and about who owns a record of how someone's body moves. Safety matters on both sides: a hand that squeezes too hard can hurt its wearer or crush a part, and a cobot working near people needs force and speed limits like the ones built into GoFa.

A 3D printed hand prototype from 2013, with cords that work as tendons. Photo: Intel Free Press / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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