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64 The PCB Design Magazine • May 2016 included, Continental Automotive, Microchip and Plexus. This year's conference brochure can be found here. Next year's event will be held in April, 20- 23, 2016 in Iasi, in the Northeastern part of Ro- mania, and is eagerly looked forward to by all who were in attendance this year and likely by many others as word of the conference spreads beyond Romania's boarders. PCBDESIGN Joseph (Joe) Fjelstad has more than 35 years of international ex- perience in electronic interconnec- tion and packaging technology in a variety of capacities from chemist to process engineer and from inter- national consultant to CEO. He is the author of the fourth edition of Flexible Circuit Technology. ROMANIAN ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY CELEBRATES 25 TH ANNIVERSARY OF TIE A University of Washington team of computer scien- tists and engineers has built a robot hand that can not only perform dex- terous manipulation but also learn from its own experience without needing hu- mans to direct it. By contrast, the UW research team spent years custom building one of the most highly capable five-fingered robot hands in the world. Then they developed an accurate simu- lation model that enables a computer to analyze movements in real time. In their latest demonstra- tion, they apply the model to the hardware and real-world tasks like rotating an elongated object. With each attempt, the robot hand gets pro- gressively more adept at spinning the tube, thanks to machine learning algorithms that help it model both the basic physics involved and plan which actions it should take to achieve the desired result. Vikash Kumar, a UW computer science and en- gineering doctoral student, custom built this robot hand, which has 40 tendons, 24 joints and more than 130 sensors. Building a dexterous, five-fingered robot hand poses challenges, both in design and control. The first involved building a mechanical hand with enough speed, strength responsive- ness and flexibility to mimic basic behaviors of a human hand. The UW's dexter- ous robot hand— which the team built at a cost of roughly $300,000—uses a Shadow Hand skel- eton actuated with a custom pneumatic system and can move faster than a human hand. It is too expensive for routine commercial or industrial use, but it allows the researchers to push core technologies and test innovative control strategies. The team first developed algorithms that al- lowed a computer to model highly complex five- fingered behaviors and plan movements to achieve different outcomes in simulation. So far, the team has demonstrated local learn- ing with the hardware system — which means the hand can continue to improve at a discrete task that involves manipulating the same object in roughly the same way. Next steps include be- ginning to demonstrate global learning — which means the hand could figure out how to manipu- late an unfamiliar object or a new scenario it hasn't encountered before. Five-fingered Robot Hand Learns to Get a Grip on Its Own