ARIA Backs Global Robotics Push to Build Smarter, Dexterous Robot Hands
The UK agency is funding breakthroughs in robot manipulation hardware to prepare for aging populations and labor shortages
When the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) launched its most ambitious robotics investment, it skipped over AI software entirely. Instead, the government-backed agency focused on something more tangible—and underdeveloped: robot hands.
ARIA is now funding 26 research teams worldwide, all targeting a deceptively complex goal: building manipulators with human-level dexterity. The move anticipates a future where AI systems are ready, but robots' physical capabilities lag behind.
“As I think I don’t need to convince this audience, we really need robots to help us face the challenges coming this century, most notably the aging population,” said Jenny Read, ARIA Programme Director, speaking at the Humanoids Summit in London on May 29. “By the end of this century, the proportion of the world population aged over 65 is likely to have tripled.”
This demographic shift, she said, means societies can no longer rely on a surplus of young workers to do physically demanding jobs. “We’re going to need robots in order to maintain our standard of living,” she added.
While breakthroughs in AI are accelerating, Read believes they are quickly running into the limits of today’s robotic hardware. “AI is great, and it’s really seeing robots take off right now,” she said. “But it’s only going to get us so far. The next bottleneck is going to be the hardware.”
Addressing the Hardware Bottleneck
Read, a neuroscientist and professor of vision science at Newcastle University, is currently on secondment to ARIA. She has defined her program’s opportunity space as “smarter robot bodies”—with a specific focus on dexterity.
“Parkour is great,” she said with a nod to humanoid demos. “But in order to be useful to us, robots really need to be able to do things with their hands—or hand equivalents.”
That, she noted, is far harder than it sounds. “You need many things to be true at the same time,” Read explained. “If you want hands as capable as human ones, you almost certainly need a high degree of freedom. You also want them to be light and include sensing, so they can handle things delicately. They need to be robust, affordable, strong—and those needs all conflict.”
Take electric motors, for example.
“They’re mature and commercially available,” she said. “But if you try to replicate a human hand with many degrees of freedom, you need a lot of motors. That can make the hand heavy, expensive, and not very compliant.”
Instead of refining existing tech, ARIA funds a diverse portfolio of radically different approaches to solve this at the hardware level. One standout is a project by Santera, a spinout from MIT and Harvard developing micro-hydraulic actuators.
“They’re essentially little motors driven by surface tension, which is kind of amazing,” said Read. “They have a plate above a layer of electrodes with water droplets embedded in grooves. By changing the voltage on the electrodes, they can pull the droplets and move the plate across them—now you have an actuator.”
What’s remarkable, she said, is the scaling behavior. “Electric motors get worse as you make them smaller. They turn into heaters. But the theory says micro-hydraulics should actually get better as they get smaller.”
That opens the door to light, compact, energy-efficient actuation systems embedded directly in robotic finger joints.
“If this works, suddenly you can have high degrees of freedom that are also strong, light, and fast,” Read said.
ARIA’s funding isn’t limited to UK labs either. “We’re able to fund outside the UK, which I think is really great,” she added. “And when we do that, we make sure there’s a benefit to the UK—for example, getting UK teams early access to prototypes.”
Supporting Full Systems and Industry Needs
Beyond individual components, ARIA is also funding the development of full robotic manipulators. Among the grantees is Arthur Hand, a young startup aiming to build a dual-armed robot with soft hands and integrated tactile sensing. Another recipient is Shadow Robot Company, which brings decades of experience developing next-generation robot hands.
“They’re going to take what we’re funding in design, co-design, and power distribution for novel actuators and combine those into even better hands than their current DEX-EE model,” said Read.
ARIA also supports Ocado Intelligent Automation (OIA), a unit of Ocado Group. Although Ocado is known for its warehouse automation systems, it still relies on humans to pack certain items.
“They don’t have robots that are dexterous enough to handle the full range of products, especially fragile items,” said Read. “We’re funding them to develop a biologically inspired manipulator that can handle that kind of variability and delicacy.”
To help these innovations move beyond the lab, ARIA is forming partnerships with industrial testbeds like the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) in Coventry and the National Composite Centre (NCC).
“They’re not building robots themselves,” Read explained. “But they have real use cases for manipulators. Many composite manufacturing processes still require human technicians because it’s too complex to automate. You’re stretching carbon fiber over molds, dealing with volatile chemicals, and applying force in awkward positions.”
Such tasks, she said, would be ideal for dexterous robots—if the technology gets there.
Building an Inclusive Robotics Pipeline
ARIA is also pushing to widen participation in robotics, acknowledging the deep underrepresentation of certain groups. A new funding call will focus on outreach programs, particularly targeting schools and communities that rarely enter STEM fields.
“We feel there are definitely groups underrepresented in robotics,” said Read. “Women are one example. I think this conference demonstrates that. I think I’m the only woman up on stage today.”
It’s not just about fairness, she emphasized.
“We know diverse teams do better—there are any number of studies showing that. And exactly as you say,” she responded to an audience question, “we’re missing out on different perspectives if we’re only recruiting from one layer of the population.”
While the funding for this initiative is smaller, Read believes it could spark long-term change.
“It felt worth trying to help,” she said. “Obviously, it’s a much bigger problem than anything you can fix as an organization, but we wanted to make a small contribution.”
Setting the Stage for Global Impact
As for where all this work is heading, Read didn’t hesitate to lay out ARIA’s vision.
“What we’re trying to get to is a new generation of robot manipulators (hands) capable of unprecedented dexterity,” she said.
Such hands would be transformative across a wide array of sectors.
“There are immediate applications in manufacturing and assembly, waste processing and disassembly—enabling a circular economy—fulfillment and logistics, lab automation, construction, agriculture,” she said. “The list goes on.”
And the benefits could stretch well beyond robotics.
“Many of the components we’re funding will be useful hardware in their own right—for example, in aerospace,” she said. “If this co-design approach works, it’ll be a new way to design robots and other smart machines.”
ARIA also sees an opportunity to position the UK as a global robotics hub.
“We have amazing robotics research. I believe we’re ranked number one globally,” said Read. “We also have a lot of VC funding. So we have all the ingredients—let’s really unlock that and make the UK the place to do robotics.”
When asked by a participant why a startup might choose the UK over countries like Germany or Switzerland, Read was candid.
“Those are great places too, and I’m not going to disrespect them,” she said. “But I think the UK is particularly vibrant. We’ve got something like four of the top 10 universities globally. Everyone’s very close, very connected. We’ve got a really vibrant VC scene—I think we’re third in the world. And I’ve definitely heard that we’re a lot better than Germany—it’s a lot easier and quicker to launch a company here.”
With AI getting smarter by the day, ARIA is betting that the next big leap in robotics won’t be about thinking—it’ll be about doing. And for that, the world needs hands.