To complete many everyday tasks and chores, humans typically use both of their hands. For instance, when opening a bottle, they use one hand to hold the bottle and the other to twist its cap. Researchers at the University of California San Diego recently developed EgoThumb, a robotic thumb that could allow people to complete some tasks that generally require both hands using only one.

Their proposed robotic system, introduced in a preprint posted on arXiv, captures images with a small camera, which are then analyzed by an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm trained to plan the thumb’s movements.

“The initial inspiration came from soldering wires,” Jiawei Fu, co-first author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.