Teen designs and builds a robotic hand with only LEGOs (www.popsci.com)

At the 2025 IEEE/RSJ IROS conference, 16-year-old Jared Lepora presented a fully functional robotic hand built entirely from LEGO MINDSTORMS and published the design on arXiv with coauthors including his father, Bristol Robotics Lab professor Nathan Lepora. Jared recreated a LEGO version of the SoftHand-A — an anthropomorphic, adaptive grasping hand originally 3D‑printed — using two motors, four fingers with two tendons per finger, and more than 100 bearings. The hardest engineering challenge was routing tendons around rotating finger bearings and compensating for the absence of springs in LEGO parts; Jared reports a mechanical workaround that preserves the hand’s adaptive grasping behavior while keeping actuation and control simple. For the AI/ML and robotics community this is significant because it democratises access to state‑of‑the‑art hand mechanics and embodied interaction experiments: an educational, low-cost platform that demonstrates adaptive, anthropomorphic grasping and is reproducible in classrooms and labs. Performance tests (response time, bearing capacity, pushing capacity, closing force) showed the LEGO SoftHand-A is slightly slower and weaker than the 3D‑printed original but not significantly so, suggesting accessible materials can support meaningful research and teaching in manipulation, control, and embodied learning. The project underscores how low-barrier hardware can inspire future researchers and enable hands‑on studies of physical intelligence.