If you grew up watching The Addams Family, you probably remember Thing crawling around as a disembodied hand. Now, researchers have built something remarkably similar.
Engineers at ETH Zurich’s Soft Robotics Lab created an autonomous robotic hand that uses its fingers as legs. It can crawl across different surfaces, recover from falls, press keyboard keys, and push objects.
How did researchers teach a robotic hand to walk?
Past attempts to make robotic hands walk relied on symmetrical fingers, since equal lengths make balancing easier. That approach meant giving up the uneven, human-like fingers and opposable thumb that allow a hand to grip everyday objects well. Led by Amir Kazemi, the team instead kept a standard human-shaped hand and trained it anyway.
They mounted a battery, motion sensors, and a small onboard computer on the hand. Then they used reinforcement learning in a simulator to teach it movement and balance from scratch. This robotic hand can crawl across 14 surfaces, including carpet, gravel, grass, and metal grating. When tipped onto its side, it can push itself upright again in 21 out of 25 attempts. That means it essentially taught itself to fall and recover as a person might.
So what else can this creepy little Thing actually do?
Walking isn’t the only trick this robotic hand can do. It can balance on four fingers while lifting the fifth finger to press keyboard keys. In a test, it selected the correct key 29 times out of 32. It can also nudge a small block across a table, landing it within two centimeters of the target in 15 separate tests.
Researchers say a fully mobile hand could squeeze into tight spaces without the robotic arm that usually carries it. It could then inspect or manipulate objects on its own before returning. They believe giving robotic hands their own mobility could make robots more versatile around human environments.
Robots have been getting increasingly strange in other ways, too. From wheel-footed machines to some other creepy-looking robotic creations, the line between useful machine and nightmare fuel is getting blurrier. Whether the latest piece of tech feels useful or unsettling to you probably depends on how you feel about disembodied hands crawling towards you.