The OpenBionics team received the 2nd Prize in the 2015 Hackaday Prize, for our affordable prosthetic hands. The winners were announced on stage at the Hackaday Superconference in San Francisco, USA on November 14, 2015.

OpenBionics is the winner of the 2015 Robotdalen International Innovation Award. A prosthetic hand concept, created by the OpenBionics initiative, was appointed first prize winner of the Robotdalen Innovation Award 2015, at a prize ceremony held in Västerås, Sweden on September 3rd.

The jury’s motivation was: “The OpenBionics Prosthetic Hand concept appears as a rather well-developed concept that has a great potential in gaining competitive edge in the market as a product. The dexterous and compliant robot hand allows the user, as an amputee with hand loss, to experience a wide variety of grasping postures. Additionally, the OpenBionics Prosthetic Hand concept satisfies the needs of the main target users concerning the light-weight and the low-price of the product. The concept benefits from the prospects of rapid prototyping using 3D printing as well as easy fabrication.” The jury consisted of Christer Norström, CEO, Swedish Institute of Computer Science (Chairman of the Jury), Narges Asadi, Industrial PhD candidate, Volvo Construction Equipment and Petter Ögren, Associate Professor, CAS, KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

By winning the Robotdalen Innovation Award 2015, OpenBionics receives a sum of SEK 110,000 (approximately €12,000) where SEK 45,000 is prize money and SEK 55,000 is offered to be used to develop the concept in cooperation with Robotdalen. The internationally oriented competition is directed at innovators, entrepreneurs, graduate and postgraduate students from all over the world who have ideas, concepts or solutions with commercial potential and breakthrough technology, addressing certain fields of robotics and automation.

– This prosthetic hand concept is in line with our focus on new technical solutions for health care and comply with our efforts to develop what we call Technology for Independent Life , says Peter Stany, Innovation Driver at Robotdalen.

The second prize in the competition went to the Danish company Odico Aps Formwork Robotics and their Robotic Hotwire Cutting proposal; a tool suitable for the construction industry which convert digital designs to real objects, as an alternative to 3D printing. Third prize went to Dr.-Ing. Mohammad Ali Nasseri, creator of the Hybrid Parallel-Serial Micromanipulator, a medical tool for eye doctors, aimed at assisting ophthalmic surgery. Even the second and third prize consists of prize money and means to further develop the concept together with Robotdalen.

I joined the GRAB Lab at Yale University as a postdoctoral associate. My research now focuses on dexterous, in-hand manipulation with simple, adaptive robot hands.