Robohub
Claire chatted to Kushant Patel from Brookhaven National Laboratory about robots that work in scientific facilities, such as particle accelerators. Kushant Patel builds software that helps robots and instruments perceive, map, and move through the physical world. After completing a Master’s in Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo, he spent two years at the University […]
IEEE Spectrum
A hand attached to the end of an arm is a given for most humans, but what if robots didn’t have to play by the same rules as we do? Researchers from ETH Zurich have turned an off-the-shelf robotic hand into a completely self-contained robot that walks on its fingertips while using those same fingers to manipulate its environment.Besides making the perfect Halloween accessory for anyone planning to dress up as a member of The Addams Family – who were famously accompanied by a disembodied walking hand called Thing – the researchers say the approach could make it possible to operate controls and handle objects in places a traditional robot arm can’t reach. Soft Robotics Lab, ETH Zurich/YouTube Amirhossein Kazemipour, a Ph.D. candidate in the Soft Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich in Switzerland who led the project, believes this hand could prove useful in contexts like fiddly maintenance tasks in industrial settings, or in search and rescue, where a robot could detach its hand to explore confined spaces too tight for the rest of its body. More broadly, he says, the work is a step toward a new approach to robotics in which body parts are not confined to a single role.“I wanted to see how much a robotic hand could do without the rest of the robot,” Kazemipour told IEEE Spectrum. “Instead of having this traditional view of robotic parts, what if we could use those parts to do other tasks that they are not designed to do.”This is not the first attempt to get a robot hand to walk, but previous work has typically relied on specially designed hands. The ETH team instead decided to use off-the-shelf hardware from Wuji Technology, augmented with an 80-gram backpack containing a battery, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and a Raspberry Pi Zero. Kazemipour says they decided to go with a commercial robot hand because they didn’t want to compromise on the hand’s manipulation capabilities. This introduced significant challenges, he adds, because a hand’s shape is optimized for grasping rather than crawling.How to Walk With FingersTo teach the hand to walk, the researchers trained a model in simulation using reinforcement learning – an approach in which models learn skills through many rounds of trial and error, receiving rewards for getting closer to the desired behavior along with penalties when they diverge from it. But Kazemipour says the unusual geometry of a hand meant they couldn’t just reuse approaches used to train other kinds of legged robots. Standard quadrupeds or bipeds tend to be symmetrical on their left and right sides, which simplifies walking and balance, he says. Hands, in contrast, are not at all symmetrical, with fingers of different lengths and an opposable thumb.In addition to rewards for moving at the right speed and in the right direction and penalties for things like wobbling or jerky movement, the team introduced a novel way to keep the hand in a crawling stance during the simulated training. To account for unequal digit length, they gave each finger its own target position relative to the palm, based on where it naturally sits when in the crawling posture. They then penalized the fingers for straying too far from that reference point, creating what they describe as “virtual springs” that pull the fingers back to the crawling stance. Crucially, the penalties for fingers moving forward and backward are significantly less than those for moving side-to-side, so taking steps in that way costs the hand very little compared with the rewards it receives for moving.The team also trained separate models for skills like righting the hand when it falls over, pressing keys on a keyboard, and pushing objects to a target. All four models fit on the onboard computer, says Kazemipour, and the controller can switch between them as necessary. In real-world tests, the hand crawled across 14 different surfaces including smooth floors, metal grates, grass, and gravel. Other experiments confirmed that it could make both right and left turns, and hit an average speed of 9 centimeters per second. The hand was able to right itself in 21 of 25 trials. When given a video feed from an overhead camera, it even managed to autonomously push a 41-gram cube to targets up to 40 cm away 15 times in a row.“What interests me most about this work is that the same fingers can move the hand, support its weight, and interact with its surroundings,” says Masahiko Inami, a professor at The University of Tokyo whose group has developed hand-shaped walking robots. He agrees that a mobile hand could be useful for reaching confined spaces and operating controls that an entire arm could not easily access, though he says practical deployment would require on-board perception and more robust navigation. Hideki Shimobayashi, a Ph.D. student in Inami’s lab, also points out that walking puts very different loads on a hand compared to grasping, so durability may be a challenge.However, Matei Ciocarlie, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University, says it’s a “cool result” that suggests robot hands don’t have to be restricted to the same capabilities as their human counterparts. “One can imagine an entirely new class of mobile manipulators that are simultaneously dexterous, able to traverse complex terrain, and able to manipulate payloads comparable in size to themselves,” he says.Kazemipour sees his work as part of a longer-term vision for robots made up of parts that are not tied to a single job or even a single body plan, something he calls “autonomous modular embodiments.” “Robotic body parts should not be permanently assigned to a single function,” he says. “They can dynamically transition between roles, between being components of one embodiment system and autonomous agents, according to the task.”
IEEE Spectrum
This White Paper gives robotics researchers and engineers an overview of a new large-scale motion capture dataset built to close the data gap limiting humanoid robot learning. It also shows how policies trained on the dataset transfer to a real humanoid robot.What you will learn about: Why humanoid robot learning, a central problem in embodied AI and Physical AI, needs data that internet video and existing motion capture datasets cannot provide. How FrameNet, a linguistic framework for human action, can guide motion capture collection to systematically cover a broad range of whole-body motion. Why synchronized object trajectories and meshes make human-object interaction data useful for teaching robots real-world tasks such as carrying, pushing, and pulling. How reinforcement learning policies trained on this motion capture data improve with scale, and how sim-to-real transfer carries them onto a physical humanoid robot.Download this free whitepaper now!
Robohub
Last month, I went to York to build a robot. I came back with a robot, a tiny trophy-shaped sense of achievement, and somehow a few new friends. From 25th-27th August, I joined the UK RAS STEPS MicroMaze Robot Hackathon at the Institute for Safe Autonomy, University of York. The brief sounded simple: build a […]
Biz & IT - Ars Technica
Compromise of 3 domain registries allows hackers to walk off with unauthorized certs.
Biz & IT - Ars Technica
The reports of OpenAI agents harming 3rd party sites keep coming.
Biz & IT - Ars Technica
Users want to "reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption" while making changes.
Biz & IT - Ars Technica
Trust gaps in the new protocol spread malicious prompts from one agent to another.
Robohub
By the University of Glasgow Giving robot companions animal-like or anime-style faces and voices could maximise their emotional appeal to users, according to new research which could help guide the growing field of social robotics. Social robots can provide companionship and comfort to their owners by mimicking human or petlike behaviours. Although the robots are […]
IEEE Spectrum
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.CoRL 2026: 9–12 November 2026, AUSTINHumanoids 2026: 6–9 December 2026, SANTA CLARA, CAEnjoy today’s videos! We’ve developed ALBATROSS, a hybrid aerial–marine robot that can be released from the air, autorotate down to the water without a parachute, passively self-right after landing, and then reuse the same rigid wings as sails for autonomous wind-powered navigation.The key idea is to make the physical structures do as much of the work as possible. Rather than carrying separate systems for aerial descent, landing, and marine propulsion, ALBATROSS uses the same wings for both autorotation and sailing, with minimal actuation. Ultimately, we’re interested in whether platforms like this could combine rapid aerial deployment with persistent, energy-efficient marine sensing.[ Singapore University of Technology and Design ] paper via [ Science Robotics ]Thanks, Shane!I’m just getting so burnt out on the humanoid publicity stunts, you know?[ Figure ]Sharpa unveiled three major proprietary new products at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS): D01, the first integrated tactile-sensing robot built for dexterous manipulation; W02, a next-generation fully tactile, ultra-compact, lightweight dexterous hand; and AE01, a high-fidelity haptic exoskeleton data glove.[ Sharpa ]Why will Boston Dynamics win the humanoid robotics race? We’ve already commercialized autonomous mobile robots, creating markets with Spot and Stretch. Now we’re doing it again with Atlas: learning in real environments, designing for manufacturing at scale, and introducing a new era of physical intelligence.[ Boston Dynamics ]This work presents a lightweight, compliant footpad that enhances the terrain adaptability of a hopping robot. The design combines a planar foot supported by a compliant spherical joint for self‑alignment with embedded spines to improve traction on uneven or slippery surfaces.[ CLIMB Lab, University of Toronto ]Heterogeneous robot teams distribute complementary capabilities across specialized agents, but their physical roles and capacities typically remain fixed throughout a mission. We present HARP, a Heterogeneous Aerial Robotic modules Platform in which independently deployable aerial robots physically reconfigure to compose their capabilities for field operations.[ General Robotics Lab ]Some very impressive mobility from ANYmal.[ ETH Zurich RSL ]Daniel writes, “I’m a high school student in Canada, and I built a self-constructing robot arm that assembles itself. It’s designed to be low-cost, with disaster response in mind: small robots can squeeze through gaps in rubble but are too weak to move things, while big arms are strong but can’t fit through. My arm is split into three wheeled modules that travel separately, then dock together using a spring-lock mechanism.”[ Daniel Zhu ]Autonomous highway driving not impressive enough for you? Try this.[ XPENG ]The IT Imperial team has connected MaleCNS—a published connectome of a male fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster)—to a physical Unitree G1 humanoid robot. The system creates a closed loop: camera → fruit-fly neural model → motor decoding → physical robot movement. The robot receives visual input through its stereo camera. The images are transformed into a representation adapted to the fly’s visual system, processed by the computational model based on the reconstructed nervous system, and then converted into movement commands for the robot.[ IT Imperial ]Thanks, Anna!My guess is that this is far easier than it looks or far harder than it looks and I’m honestly not sure which.[ Paper ]I cannot believe that this is still a thing, but good on them![ Tevel ]In Part 1 of Dexterity Explained, we break down what manual dexterity is, why it matters, and how robotic hands and Physical AI work together to bring greater skill, precision, and control to physical tasks.[ Sanctuary AI ]XPENG has a lot of money to build a lot of these robots. They do look very human. I’m not sure what they’re going to do, though?[ XPENG ]That’s a lot of robots! Tell me what they’re all going to do![ UBTECH ]When floods swept away roads and bridges in Nepal, local drone pilots stepped in to help map the damage, support search teams, and deliver essential supplies to communities cut off from help. In this episode of Ground Truth with Flying Labs, host Leka Tingitana speaks with Uttam Pudasaini, an advisor to Nepal Flying Labs, and Raj Bikram Maharjan, co-founder of Airlift Technology, about the drone community’s response to the devastating floods of 26 August 2026.[ WeRobotics ]
Robohub
Claire chatted to Michelle Lu from Vsim Technology about using simulation and artificial intelligence to teach robots new skills. Michelle Lu is co-founder and CEO of Vsim Technology. She was previously a Director of Simulation Technology at NVIDIA, where she and her co-founder created the world’s first end-to-end GPU-accelerated reinforcement learning (RL) framework, Isaac Gym, […]
IEEE Spectrum
Today, Boston Dynamics is announcing a redesigned hand for its Atlas robot. The previous generation could do some crazy superhuman things with its three fingers, but it was never intended for mass production in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Switching from research hardware to a scalable product makes previously ignorable questions suddenly paramount: how can you make a hand that does everything you need it to do, but is also rugged and reliable and cost effective? It’s questions like these that drove the design of the new Atlas hand, and while it doesn’t look much like a human hand, it might be a hand that makes it out into the real world. - YouTube www.youtube.com Compared to the almost eerily human-like hands designed by a litany of other humanoid robotics companies, Atlas’ new hand does look awfully clunky. We’ve certainly seen some of those robots with much more human-like hands perform dexterous manipulation tasks that are, speaking as someone who has personally witnessed robots haplessly fumble their way through the world for nearly two decades now, nothing short of incredible. And it’s not just what these hands can do—it’s how they look while doing it, as slim, graceful mechanical copies of our own hands. They seem like science fiction, and to some extent, that’s exactly what they are.“Hands are a ruthless design tradeoff,” Alberto Rodriguez, Director of Robot Behavior at Boston Dynamics, tells IEEE Spectrum. “There’s no way around it, you’re always giving up on something. And many of the current designs are giving up on things like reliability and manufacturability.” This is what invariably happens when you try and cram everything necessary to make a robotic hand function into the form factor of a human hand: it’s going to be either very fragile or very expensive, and likely both at the same time. The unfortunate reality is that for now, and likely for the immediate future, all that these sorts of hands are good for are research and demos.With Atlas’ new hand, Boston Dynamics is making the design tradeoffs necessary to achieve a hand that, according to the press release: is capable of a vast array of useful tasks, including using tools; is strong and rugged; can be cleanly simulated; can be mass manufactured and repaired at reliably low cost, and is close enough in form factor to a human hand that human demonstrations can be used to train it.You’ll notice that “looks cosmetically like a human hand” is nowhere on that list, and this new hand doesn’t. Rodriguez explains that getting rid of the pinky was a straightforward decision, agreed on after his team spent a day with their pinkies taped to their ring fingers. But why even add a fourth finger, when the previous generation of Atlas’ hand seemed to do well with only three? It’s not just the extra finger, but a complete redesign that almost doubled the degrees of freedom between the old hand and the new, going from 7 to 13. Boston Dynamics“We also added the ability for the fingers to splay open, because we knew that it was important for one finger to be able to move against another, and we also knew that we needed to be able to hold the handle of a tool with a trigger,” Rodriguez says, which includes many common tools like drills or welding torches. “We’re convinced that from a product perspective, this hand should be able to do everything we need it to do for the foreseeable horizon.” And that ability to finger splay goes beyond what human hands are capable of. According to Rodriguez, “with reinforcement learning we can discover uses for these superhuman extra motions, and exploit them.”Reliability, manufacturability, and cost are all closely related. By reducing the degrees of freedom relative to other more anthropomorphic hand designs down to just 13, Boston Dynamics can use fewer, larger, and more powerful actuators. The actuators are embedded directly into the joints themselves in a direct drive configuration, with a transmission that allows the motors to be back-driven and react to force and contact. Each actuator pack is a single unit that can be easily replaced, and there are no delicate tendons or cables across joints to stretch and break. “What we’re working on right now is figuring out what needs to change in the fine details of our design if we want to make 100,000 of these hands a year,” Rodriguez says.Not every humanoid company will make the tradeoffs that Boston Dynamics has done here, and there’s still plenty of room for creativity when it comes to hand design. But if humanoids with hands are going to scale, some difficult decisions will have to be made, and it’ll take some compromise to deliver on the promises that the humanoid industry has committed to.