Humanoid
Boston Dynamics has unveiled a new hand for its Atlas humanoid, featuring four fingers and 13 degrees of freedom, a significant increase from the seven degrees of freedom in previous versions. The company said the hand is directly actuated and designed for mass manufacturing, marking a shift in focus from grasping a wide variety of objects to manipulating them.
Previous Atlas hands were built to grasp many objects, but the latest design prioritizes manipulation. “We considered many, many designs, and there were many questions like: Do we want the hand to have one thumb or two thumbs? Do we really want the hand to have a pinky or not? And most of these don’t have straight answers,” said Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior for Atlas. He added that the process involves intuition and experimentation, boiling down to a trade-off among competing objectives.
The four-fingered hand, which omits a pinky finger, is built for high-fidelity simulation to enable sim-to-real reinforcement learning. Boston Dynamics maintained transparent direct actuation at the joints, all with a single actuator type. As in Atlas’s body, these actuators are completely encapsulated, with no fragile cables crossing joints. The hand is capable of sliding the fingertip of the thumb along the length and across the width of all other fingers, dexterous pinch grasps between the thumb and any other finger, dexterous tripodal grasps, and triggered tool grasps such as drills, power torque drivers, grinders, nail guns, and welding torches.
The four-fingered hand, which omits a pinky finger, is built for high-fidelity simulation to enable sim-to-real reinforcement learning.
The news comes just a week after Boston Dynamics opened its Robotics Metaplant Application Center (RMAC) at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America. The company said the Georgia facility is a training center for integrating Atlas humanoids into parent Hyundai’s automotive manufacturing operations.
Source: The Robot Report