Four fingers, one actuator type, touch sensors on the fingertips and palm, a load of over 100 pounds. The pinky is gone because the CTO asked the team to tape their two small fingers together for a day and report what they could not do. Per IEEE Spectrum, the goal now is how to make 100,000 of these hands a year.
- Degrees of freedom grow from 7 to 13; the fingers can splay. Built for accurate simulation and reinforcement learning, so policies move from the simulator to the real world.
- Trigger grasps: drills, power torque drivers, grinders, nail guns, welding torches. A loaded minifridge of over 100 pounds, per the company.
- Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior, to IEEE Spectrum: hands are a ruthless design trade-off, you are always giving up on something.
Tape your pinky to your ring finger and live like that for a day. That is what the CTO of Boston Dynamics asked his team to do, and out of their report at the end of the experiment came a hand with no pinky.
Anyone who has built a stage knows this conversation. You could put in ten effects. You put in the three the audience will see, because the other seven are cables, weight and things that break right in the middle of the show.
The same arithmetic is done here, with fingers. One more finger means three more actuators, more volume, more points of failure and a more expensive hand. For a robot meant to sell in volume, that decides it.
The fine print is elsewhere: one actuator type for every joint. It is not for elegance. The factory makes one part and swaps it as a module. The 100,000 a year that Rodriguez mentions to IEEE Spectrum makes no sense without a part like that.
The 100-pound fridge is the company's number; we did not lift it. What the hand can do outside the demo will show in the Georgia plant, where a drill trigger gets pulled a thousand times a shift.