Atlas Robot’s New Hand May Outperform Human-Like Designs

Source context

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