Move over, humanoids. Robotic body parts step up

If you’re creeped out by disembodied appendages, look away now. Everyone else, welcome to the next phase of the labor market. Roboticists have successfully demonstrated a detached robotic hand that surpasses human dexterity while navigating environments and manipulating objects entirely independent of a central torso or an arm. Catch Skyler Ware’s handy writeup for Science News.

🖐️ Putting the brain in the palm

To optimize their blueprint for a crawling robotic hand, scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and MIT used machine learning to generate and analyze virtual representations of different robotic traits in combination. To overcome the inherent biological constraints of the human hand (think thumbs, unidirectional bending and fixed reach) they settled on a robotic hand with a detachable wrist and with fingers that can bend backwards and forwards. Their modular five- and six-fingered designs allow any finger pair to function as an opposing grip, enabling efficient grasping from any angle. Most notably, the hand can crawl autonomously, extending its workspace to manipulate and retrieve objects that would otherwise be out of reach.

🦾 Modular manpower: The appendage-as-a-service market

Robotics is embarking on a fundamental shift from humanoid clones to modular, task-specific appendages. This reduces the cost and complexity of automation: why buy a $100,000 bipedal robot to move a box when a $5,000 autonomous hand can crawl over and do it for you? While Tesla’s Optimus and other bipeds grab the headlines, the real muscle lies in modularity.