The Shadow Dexterous Hand is a humaniform robot hand system developed by The Shadow Robot Company in London. The hand is comparable to a human hand in size and shape, and reproduces all of its degrees of freedom. The Hand is commercially available and currently used by NASA, Bielefeld University and Carnegie Mellon University. It reportedly costs more than $100,000. The Hand uses the sense of touch, pressure, and position to reproduce the human grip in all its strength, delicacy, and complexity.
The SDRH was first developed by Richard Greenhill and his team of engineers in Islington, London, as part of The Shadow Project, (now known as the Shadow Robot Company) an ongoing research and development program whose goal is to complete the first convincing humanoid. An early prototype can be seen in NASA’s collection of humanoid robots, or robonauts. The Hand has haptic sensors embedded in every joint and finger pad, which relay information to a central computer for processing and analysis.
The Daily Omnivore 