Episode: 1686
Title: HPR1686: Interview with Joel Gibbard of OpenHand
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1686/hpr1686.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 07:44:04

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This is HPR Episode 1686 entitled Interview with Joel Gibard of Open Hand
and is part of the series Accessibility.
It is hosted by Steve Bickle and is about 27 minutes long.
The summary is an interview with Joel Gibard founder of the prize winning open hand project.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
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This show is an interview with Joel Gibard founder of the open hand project.
The interview is recorded on my phone which unfortunately created a few glitches.
I've cleaned up the audio's best I can, although frustrating the occasional glitches
haven't caused anything to be missed that cannot be picked up from the context of the recording.
After creating an artificial hand for his degree project,
Joel Gibard wanted to continue the work on the hand,
with the goal of producing a workable prosthetic hand for a thousand dollars.
So he launched the open hand project with a successful Indiegogo fundraiser.
In this interview, we learn more about the Dexterous Hand,
the project's progress to date, and here Joel's vision of affordable prosthetics for amputees worldwide.
If you've never heard of the open hand project, it might be worth watching Joel's
four-minute introduction to the project at teenyurl.com forward slash OHVID.
The full link to the video is in the show notes, along with links to the project,
where the designs are available for download.
The question to ask was what actually inspired you to start open hand?
Well, it was, I was sitting in my bedroom one day just wanting a new project to start,
I'm just going to do, pick something from my notebook, and I thought to myself
that I would be incapable of doing any, like, making, if I didn't have my hand,
my hand in a moment, I thought to myself, oh, I should make a robotic hand just in case I ever lose one
so that I have a spare. And that was enough drive for me to start this, and I thought it'd be
fun project, so I started fixing an ininium and folding it up, and that was how I made the first one.
And I only really saw a realistic application for it when I was at university,
and that was as an excuse to make another one for a final year project.
You came away with the degree of the back of that project?
Yeah, yeah, the project went really, really well. My university professors didn't think I'd be
able to, or a couple of them didn't think it was going to be a feasible project in the time scale.
So, anyway, unfortunately managed to pull it off, so yeah, it was very well received and got
very good marks. Oh, that's great. With the hand now, you're using 3D printer, which three
days ago, you're using the one you originally started with? Yeah, good question.
Yeah, I'm still using the one that I started with. I started off with the Molesbot A0101,
which is the first one I think they sold, or maybe the second one they sold,
this is in based in America. And they were one of the first people to start offering 3D
printers commercially, so that I bought that about two years ago, nearly two years ago now,
and started printing with that. Still print with that, it's going pretty well. They donated to the
Open Hand Project, Molesbot TAS, which is still going strong, and we have a Robox, which
sell, so they donated it to us as well. So, we've got three at the moment,
that seems to have got some more space to put them. Is this because of throughput you need
so many machines, or are each of them applicable to different parts of the hand?
Yeah, both really. We have, the TAS is printing with the Ninja Flex flexible filament at the moment,
so we're using, so that's limited by the extruder to just print inflexible filaments.
The other two printers are printing in PLA, but we will,
we might be different. And at that point, we're going to have to get a couple of printers that are
always just printing off, you know, like manufacturing, rather than prototyping.
Does this mean you'll need to move to a different class of printer, or do you?
I'm actually, I'm going to hack a Lolesbot TAS to have three extruders on the same
X-axis, so it's, I'm going to take one of their printers and then just duplicate the extruder,
and then we'll post it, so it will print the exact same thing, times three.
Oh, wow, so, so, like, you see what I mean. Yeah, like the old
trapezoidal copy things, three in a row at the same time.
So that's the plan, and I'm pretty sure it's possible, so hopefully that means we'll have to have
a third as many 3D printers, so we could otherwise need to. So that'll save, save on energy and
in speed. So I guess, I guess a lot of people are focusing on the 3D printing, because it's
it's the, it's the in thing at the moment and in the news, but aside from that, presumably there's
a lot going on with electronics control systems, motors and actuators.
Yeah, well, I think the innovations that we are pushing are in, at the moment, are in the
mechanical design, so probably 3D printing is the right thing to be focusing on, and at least the
mechanical design of our hands. The electronics, we've, we've got another, another iteration of it,
which is basically the same thing, but smaller and a few more features.
We've been experimenting with different actuators, so we've got some linear actuators now from
company called Fergelli, based in Canada, and they're going to do the job really nicely.
But in terms of sort of control theory and signal processing, those are things that are really keen
to look into, and got some really cool ideas for it, but we haven't had the resources.
Is this off of running off of a digital platform, or is it more conventional analog control?
Oh, it's all digital signal processing. I mean, we just, our, our control board is,
we use the Arduino programming environment, and we use the at-mega-256O chip,
and it's basically just tailored to drive motors, rather than lots of
digital aircraft, a normal Arduino board would be.
You mentioned in the, in the introductory video, that you use feedback to control the,
the grip. Is this just picking up the sensors for that?
There is definitely a sense at the moment, at the moment we're just reading the current drawn
by each of the motors, and which is a, it's a really robust way of detecting when the hand has
gripped something, because no matter which joint you need, you will receive that signal.
Whereas if you have pressure sensors on the fingertips, it relies on the fingertips coming
into contact with the object. And so at the moment, we're just using the current sensing,
but we've, we've got, at the robotics lab, the crystal wave, experimenting with a project that
does very fine fingertip detection. So hopefully we'll be able to integrate that into our hand
at some point, and then we'll be able to do some kind of fun sensing. And to be honest,
I don't think that at the moment is going to have a very useful application in prosthetics,
but hopefully it'll, it'll produce a really cool
prototype, and we can experiment with it and find out how we can use it effectively.
Do you have people using the hand at the moment at all?
No, we're still prototyping. We've tested one successfully on an amputee,
but when I say successfully, we've got everything to work, as is always the way at the beginning.
So our next, we're hoping that our next prototype is available. And in a few months,
we want to get one working, la, la, la, enough that we can field test it, leave it with a couple
of amputees and see how they get on with it and find out what happened.
So are there any sort of safety considerations you have to put into the design?
Well, I mean, it has to conform to CE regulation if you're going to be selling it as a medical
device, which we do intend to. So it's a knock that we're going to have to do at some point in the
future, which we are thinking about. But currently, haven't, haven't sought to start the process,
and little bit bit bit do once we have a fully functional prototype,
functional and robust and usable. Safety concerns, the other thing we're looking at is
making sure the materials can remain in contact with the skin for a long time. Besides that,
I mean, it's never going to be too strong to do any functional bones with it or anything like that.
Some people are worried. So we keep it in mind, but I don't think there are any other
particular precautions that we've had to consider. Not yet, anyway. Perhaps testing will prove
different. You keep saying we, so I presume there's not just you working on this now,
have you other people working with you on the project? Yeah, it was initially just me,
the open hand project was, I was on my own. And then in around August of this year, I had,
I started having other people collaborate with me. And that's ranged from people doing internships.
Now there are three of us working full time and two people working part time as well. And also,
there's people helping to test the hand as well. So we've got Dan, who's our main
test guinea pig at the moment, who's been coming down to the lab to test things out with us.
So it's very much a team at the point. Since the time project, we've created,
and that's how we're kind of pursuing funding opportunities and trying to commercialise some
of our robotic hands. I see. The whole open source thing is quite interesting. And it
hits leads to some interesting. How much of open hand is open sources? And how much of what you
use to make it as open source? Yeah, we will make all of our work open source. And we intend for
it always to be that way. We've just been rubbish at doing it lately, just actually putting it
online and getting it out there is harder than it sounds. I mean, uploading files is easy, but
we want to make sure that people are able to build these hands as well. Things like that in
time, and making sure that the circuit designing that's going to work at all.
Some people don't know where everything is always available, but that's something I'd rather
have releases and then release everything when it's ready. I'm happy with it. So everything
is going to be open source. It's just getting around to pushing it out. Sure. So when you do push it
out there, what sort of open source licensing are you able to firm up? Yeah, that's still to be
decided. I have put designs up online for one of our previous prototypes, and I used the Linux
GNU General Purpose License for software, and to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing. I
think I tried to apply the same license, but hardware, but I don't think that's possible. That
realistically have any meaning. So yeah, that's another thing that I need to look more into
to do it properly, as opposed to just... As there is an open source design, do you know if any
other people who've built hands or are contributing back to the project? Yeah, lots of people have built
hands, actually, all over the world. The difficulty with, because its application is a prosthetic,
I'm with a certain expectation, so the worry is that people make it thinking, I'm going to give
this to my friend and they can wear it as a robotic hand, but it's very far from that level of complete
completion. But lots of people have made them as easy-to-order projects, so there's the Royal
Military College in Canada with the Prophets of Setic's project, and they use the
Driftress Hand from the Non-Project as the robotic hand, which is the PDU use case.
When a robot hand is doing some experimentation around that, with maybe my electric sensors or
software algorithms to read signals, or looking at people's reactions,
to redostics, and things like that, those are the perfect use cases, so that people don't
re-impact people that do want to build on the designs. To be honest, I'm not aware of anybody that's
made any sort of huge changes, but I do know some people that have printed it.
Oh, it's cool. People offering to help out from outside of your core team, at all.
Yeah, we've had lots of people offering to help.
So far, I've found it impossible to try and organize that when I said I did it because I wanted to be
tinkering rather than organising lots of other people who get tinker. And as such, we haven't
really drawn on many of the offers from people. It's difficult to expect to see them,
though, putting a lot of people going to work very well. But that said, there are some people doing
stuff for us. People that are really, really keen and have a particular interest in the area.
There are a few people that are doing very different experimental things. So there's somebody
who's looking into the reconnecting of the hand. Yeah, so things like that, there are other people
helping us along. So what would you expect the open handle, open biomex to look like in five years
time and beyond? Why do you project? Well, yeah, the ideal future would be
micro-manufacturing plants in all different countries, developing countries
inside of prosthetics clinics. The implementation of this technology would be if you could
distribute the knowledge and the designs to a clinic who had then the localized skills to
scan somebody's arm to really print them a prosthetic and then fit up with your girl. So this is
what we're working towards. Hopefully, we're going to start selling prosthetics around the year.
We'll start in Europe and the US. We're toying with different ideas for
trying to serve developing countries as well as Western countries by way of a certain percentage
of each purchase would go towards a hand for somebody. But yeah, five years from now, I would
love to have, I would love for there to be micro-manufacturing units, 3D scanners, 3D printers,
in clinics all over the world. Wow, yeah, that sounds like a great girl. She used to bring this
in under a thousand dollars a hand. I know that was your original stated girl. Is that looking possible?
Ultimately, yes. The time, the time frame on that is still up in the air.
We're going to market some of our products to the hobbyist market and the academic markets.
As far as this is, where people might want robotic hands and in doing so, use that
those markets to help supplement our business. So we're going to kick that off in February and see
how we get on. But if we can be profitable enough from that, then we'll be able to have the price
of a thousand dollars. I think realistically, to begin with, they'll probably have to put
a lot of thousand pounds, so not dramatically higher. And then we'll have to work towards that goal,
it's 100% something that we're going to do in the future. It's a question of when, rather than if.
Well, that's terrific. On the on the other side of this, I guess, the Monday's, Monday's
started with the Indiegogo. I remember that because I've got a very nice set of gloves off of you.
Yeah, thank you very much. It's a keep it, which I keep in my bag.
I've lost, I've lost, I had several pairs left over, but I'm on my own anyway.
So what's been happening with the funding, I noticed you won a prize recently. I can't honestly
recall my research isn't good enough to say who it was from. Yeah, we've been,
we've been about to 10,000 pounds from into it in April. And then in November, we won,
well, then we won another 30,000 pounds from Intel in September. And then another 125,000 pounds
from Intel. So we've been very, very lucky with various different competitions that we've been
entering. And that's how we've been getting by this far and how we intend to fund our development
work for the next, for the next six months to a year. The next stage after this, we've, we've
put in some pits for some different grants in the UK. So there's quite a lot of money out there
for these kind of small businesses. And the other thing we're trying to hold off a lot of
a lot of the TTTBBA funding, either with engine investors or venture capitalists investors,
could be really, really good for the business. But of course, there's, when you do that, your,
your kind of promised huge levels of growth. So it's time for everyone.
Yes, some people might say that didn't go so well for Makerbot.
Yeah, well, I mean, for those that do, I think,
Makerbot, I've still done an incredibly good job of democratizing 3D printing, even if not
through their own. So yeah, I don't know. I suppose ultimately it's about your,
your ultimate goals. And do you get to achieve this division of the, the micro manufacturing
in the clinics? Well, yeah, I mean, the real, the real goal is for amputees to have access
to low-cost prosthetics. So as long as that happens, it doesn't really matter. Even if we,
we're not individually successful, that ideally we'll have, when we, at the moment, there are no
basic, I mean, there's a few people making mechanical hands,
public-driven prostheses. There are prosthetics for kids, but they're cosmetic, or they're
hooks and things like that, but no one's making cool robot hands for kids. But at least I don't
have a flyable option for them, because kids need a new prosthesis every year or so. There's no way
the parents can be talking out 100,000 pounds a year for something like that. Oh, no. So I really hope
that we're going to have, when we start releasing products a year from now, we're going to start
having some competitors, and then they're going to, and we'll create that, a new kind of market,
and we won't then have to worry quite so much about our own
future as a company, because whatever happens, somebody's still going to be providing low-cost
prosthetic, robotic prosthetic. I think I'll always come to the end of my list of questions here.
Is there anything else that you want to say about the project that I haven't asked about?
That's everything. That's great. So the best place for HPR listeners to find more about the project
would be... So there's OpenHandProject.org, and OpenHandXX.com. So the UNIX website is the one
that we're updating at the moment with everything that we're doing. That's probably the best one to
follow. When I'm aiming to upload the next iteration of designs in a few weeks, that'll go to both
of those websites. So yeah, either of those. And Twitter, app, app, OpenHandX.org. I love to add that.
Okay. Well, it's been terrific. Thanks very much for your time. It's been good to chat.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for the interview. Yeah, no problem at all. Thank you,
Steve. Thanks for being here. Okay, thanks. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.
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