For many of us, the last—and only—time we’ve seen a walking hand was Thing in “The Addams Family” movies or TV series. Now there’s another. Engineers from the Soft Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich have adapted an off-the-shelf detached robotic hand so it can crawl across different surfaces, balance and interact with its environment.

But this is no sci-fi gimmick. Fully mobile robotic hands could be useful in hard-to-reach spaces. “A robotic hand with its own mobility could operate in confined workspaces without requiring the arm that normally carries it to follow,” says the research team.

Less than handy robotic hands

Until now, robotic hands trying to walk on their own ran into a major design catch. Previous projects made hands walk by giving them symmetrical fingers. That made crawling easier, but it meant moving away from the unequal fingers and opposed thumb of a conventional human-like robotic hand.

Those differences in finger shape and size help standard robotic hands handle everyday objects. But their uneven lengths make walking without tipping over more difficult because each fingertip has a different reach.

A team led by Amir Kazemi overcame these limitations by teaching an off-the-shelf, human-like hand with unequal fingers to balance, crawl and work independently. The team describes how it did so in a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server.

The team mounted a battery, motion sensors and a miniature computer on the back of the robotic hand and taught it to move and balance using reinforcement learning in a computer simulator. Then they put it to the test.

The hand crawled across 14 different indoor and outdoor surfaces, including carpet, gravel, grass and metal grating. In 25 tests that started with it lying on either side, it pushed itself back upright and recovered its stance 21 times.

Putting its fingers to work

The robot performed other tasks, too. While balancing its weight on four fingers, the hand lifted its remaining finger to press four different arrow keys. It hit the correct key 29 out of 32 times.

In another test, the hand walked up to a small block and pushed it across a table, placing it within two centimeters (0.8 inches) of the target spot during 15 tests.

Looking ahead, the team believes its approach could change how mobile robots work in human environments. “Giving robotic hands their own mobility could make future robots more versatile in the spaces and interfaces built for people.”

Who’s behind this story?

Paul Arnold

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Lisa Lock

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Robert Egan

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