In October the student presented robotic entirely handcrafted from LEGO at the 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Hangzhou, China. But Jared Lepora isn't in grad school or college—he's a teenager.
However, the 16-year-old co-author of a study recently published in arXiv along with colleagues including his father, Nathan Lepora, professor of robotics and artificial intelligence at the University of Bristol. Jared used LEGO MIDDLESTORMSA LEGO robotics kit designed to build a LEGO version of SoftHand-A, a 3D printed anthropomorphic robot. robot hand presented in earlier study.
“My father is a professor at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL). He designs robotic systems with complex mechanisms that have many real-world applications,” Jared wrote in his presentation, slides of which were sent by email. Popular Science. “My goal was to create an educational design that shows professional mechanics in a simple educational way that children can understand.
This hand is a LEGO version of SoftHand-A, a 3D printed anthropomorphic robot hand. CREDIT: University of Bristol/Jared Lepora.
He designed the hand digitally for the first time, and it has two motors and four fingers with two tendons each. The most complex part of the design was the routing of tendons around rotating bearings in the fingers, allowing the joints to flex and the finger to flex or extend when the tendons were pulled. In total there are more than 100 in the distribution bearings— components involved in rotation — and Jared even found a way around the fact that, unlike the 3D-printed SoftHand-A, LEGO has no springs.
“Overall, this design results in an anthropomorphic hand that can adaptively grasp a wide range of objects using a simple actuation and control mechanism,” the researchers write in the paper. “Because the arm can be built from LEGO pieces and using the latest robotic arm design concepts, it can educate and inspire children to learn about the cutting-edge capabilities of modern robotics.”
Moreover, Jared claims that the LEGO hand is just as good as the SoftHand-A, as demonstrated in tests for response time, load-bearing capacity, pushing capacity, and closing force. In fact, tests presented in the presentation show that the LEGO SoftHand-A has a slower response time and lower load-bearing capacity, pushing capacity and closing force, but not significantly.
“My generation (and younger) is the future or [of] robotics, so it’s important that we understand and are interested in the field,” says Jared. “Making your own robot arm is a great way to learn robotics.”
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