Teen designs and builds a robotic hand with only LEGOs

In October, a student presented a robotic hand made entirely from LEGOs at the 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Hangzhou, China. But Jared Lepora isn’t in graduate school, college–he’s a teenager. 

Nonetheless, the 16-year-old co-authored research recently published on arXiv along with colleagues including his father Nathan Lepora, a professor of robotics and artificial intelligence at the University of Bristol. Jared used LEGO MINDSTORMS, a LEGO robotics kit, to build a LEGO version of SoftHand-A, a 3D-printed anthropomorphic robot hand introduced in an earlier study. 

“My dad is a professor at the Bristol Robotics laboratory (BRL). He designs robotic systems with complicated mechanisms that have lots of real-world applications,” Jared wrote in his presentation, whose slides were emailed to Popular Science. “My goal was to create an educational design which shows professional mechanisms in a simple educational way” understandable by children.

The hand is a LEGO version of SoftHand-A, a 3D-printed anthropomorphic robot hand. CREDIT: University of Bristol/Jared Lepora.

He first designed the hand digitally and it has two motors and four fingers with two tendons in each. The hardest part of the design was the tendon routing around the rotating bearings in the fingers, which allows the joints to bend and the finger to flex or extend when the tendons are pulled. In total, the hand includes over 100 bearings—components involved in rotation—and Jared even found a way around the fact that, unlike the 3D-printed SoftHand-A, LEGOs don’t  have springs. 

“Altogether, this design results in an anthropomorphic hand that can adaptively grasp a broad range of objects using a simple actuation and control mechanism,” the researchers write in the paper. “Since the hand can be constructed from LEGO pieces and uses state-of-the-art design concepts for robotic hands, it has the potential to educate and inspire children to learn about the frontiers of modern robotics.”

What’s more, Jared argues that the LEGO hand is as good as the SoftHand-A, as demonstrated through tests on response times, bearing capacity, pushing capacity, and closing force. In reality, the tests highlighted in the presentation show that the LEGO SoftHand-A had slower response times and less bearing capacity, pushing capacity, and closing force—but not significantly. 

“My generation (and younger) are the future or [of] robotics, so it is essential we understand and take interest in this field,” Jared says. “Building a robot hand with your own hands is a great way to learn about robotics.”

 

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