Although it wasn’t apparently designed with this in mind, it seems particularly fortuitous that this walking robotic hand was released in time for Halloween. Designed by researchers from ETH Zurich, the slightly unsettling disembodied hand can use its fingers as legs to traverse terrain, push small objects around, and operate a keyboard.
The researchers started from commercially-available robot hand, equipped it with a battery and Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, and developed neural net-based software to control it. The hand has twenty joints, four per finger, and the neural net iteratively outputs the next joint state, based on previous movements, the state of the hand, and the hand’s current goal. To train the net, the researchers built a simulated model, then used this for reinforcement learning; this yielded a faster walking speed than an adapted quadrupedal motion model did.
The hand was trained to move in a straight line, turn, recover from a fall, and press the keys of a keyboard (since it doesn’t have a camera, though, it can’t operate a keyboard by itself). The fall recovery is impressive to watch: in 21 out of 25 tests, it was able to right itself within twenty seconds. Due to the hand’s geometry, it drifts to the right while walking, so a constant correction needed to be applied. It did, however, manage to successfully cross fourteen varying surfaces, ranging in roughness from a rubber mat to gravel and grass. It even managed to push light objects toward goals.
The authors envision this kind of autonomous hand enabling greater freedom for a larger robot, such as a robot arm: if it needs to reach something farther away, the hand simply detaches and walks over. Regardless of the use to which they put in, such a project is already within reach of hackers; we’ve seen a few robotic hand projects here over the years.
The Yellow Shadow would be impressed.
This is just fantastic. Love everything about it. I need an autonomous robot hand.
the “thing” about this is that crab is peak fitness
Uh, hey um… Ian Malcolm has entered the chat
If it’s not one Thing it’s another.
The odd movie version of Thing. In the show it is more like an organic part of the house with a hand at every Thing box ready take or deliver items. The movie Thing was just not right.
Thing. It.
Piece of Ash, of course.
Groovy. (ISWYDT)
Someone is a fan of Red Dwarf. All it needs is an eyeball on the middle finger.
I was thinking the same thing too:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fYAlB1Kxayc
One of the greatest episodes.
Just sick…
It’s not sick enough until they develop a hands-free goatse device.
Two hands, one but.
But what?
That’s fantastic.. Now all they need to do is get in touch with some special effects makeup and prosthetics people to create a silicone sleeve for it.
Somebody tell Gomez that Cousin Itt has ecaped!
No ore barons! Freedom for The Sleeper!
The Hands of Orlac!
Bride of Reanimator!
https://youtu.be/wyXOIzFeQj4?is=CEftgai_AQ5n5k6y
The Hand of Count Petofi
Booh. It doesn’t even “walk”, only slightly wiggles. Could be far faster.
That was a little disappointing, but it still wiggles pretty well. I think articulation of the joints might still be the issue. Of course, when you pretend to do the same thing with your own hand on a table, you’re actually holding it up and moving with your arm and just pretending that the fingers are the parts doing the locomotion. I guess balance makes this far more difficult to accomplish in real life.
There is an actual working Thing from the TV show. Self contained. Radio controlled.
The fx studio was commissioned to make it for the street level ad campaign where they had it scurrying around in the street.
The makers brought it by Adam Savage’s Tested workshop and they did a video on it, including a version without the rubber skin.