Technology News

A robotic hand that walks away on its own fingers! 🪬 We finally have the Thing from Addams family in robotics, and it was developed at ETH Zürich. No wheels, no legs bolted underneath, no separate drive mechanism. The same fingers that grasp things also carry the hand across a surface and hold up its weight. A quadruped has four identical legs spaced evenly around its body, and most legged-locomotion reward functions quietly assume exactly that. A hand has fingers of different lengths, arranged unevenly around a palm, with a thumb that matches none of them. The team wrote a reward formulation for that unequal geometry, and in simulation it moves faster than tuned rewards borrowed from quadruped work. They kept the hand's existing finger design and its position controller, so this isn't a bespoke machine built for the demo. And power and computation sit onboard, so it runs untethered. → Crawling, steering, and recovery after being knocked over → While holding itself up, it executes a sequence of keyboard commands with no vision at all → It pushes an object to target positions using overhead visual feedback → The simulator was calibrated against measurements taken from the physical hardware A hand that walks to a task and then performs the task is a mobile manipulator with no locomotion hardware in it. Big shoutout to authors @amrhkzp! 😮‍💨 🔗 Here's the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2609.17172 ~~  ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com