Creepy Robot Hand Crawls Across Desks, Types And Plays Retro PC Games
Call it a blend of horror trigger and engineering prowess, but researchers at ETH Zurich’s Soft Robotics Lab have trained a robotic hand to operate away from its robotic arm, crawling across the floor using its own digits. We didn't realize disembodied robot hands are such a huge thing (literally—if you know, you know) in robotics, but this latest interpretation of the concept is the most realistic and capable yet.
The project, published in Arxiv by engineers Amirhossein Kazemipour, Zheng Hehui, and Robert Katzschmann, turns a standard commercial WUJI robotic hand into an untethered, self-supported mobile agent. Weighing 818 grams (1.8 pounds), the hand module packs 20 powered joints across its five fingers alongside onboard computation via Raspberry Pi, motion sensors and a lithium-polymer battery mounted to the palm.
Teaching a humanoid hand that possesses fingers of varying lengths, off-center joints, and an opposing thumb to "walk" is a unique beast, even in robotics where even lifting a single finger to take a step instantly destabilizes the rest of the structure. To master consistent locomotion, the team trained neural networks inside NVIDIA's Issac lab simulation platform using deep reinforcement learning.
The system rewarded stable postures and forward progress, allowing the hand to autonomously determine when to lift each digit. In simulations, the hand reached a crawling speed of 1.67 centimeters per second—a little faster than a garden snail, but still outperforming conventional quadruped algorithms adapted for the same body.
Nonetheless, the resulting hardware-software combo has proven to be quite versatile. The hand successfully crawled across 14 diverse indoor and outdoor surfaces, and if it's ever knocked over, a recovery algorithm enables the robot to right itself back onto its fingertips in 84% of hardware fall attempts.
