Fingers as legs: ETH video shows a robot hand that crawls on its own and presses keys
Researchers in Zurich used AI training to teach an off-the-shelf robot hand to walk. It carries its own battery and computer, crosses 14 surfaces and gets back up after falls.
Photo: NearEMPTiness / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Video: YouTube · ETH Zürich · youtube.com
Robot hands are usually attached to an arm. ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab has built a hand that moves around by itself: it carries its own weight, crawls on its fingertips and grasps objects with the same fingers. This week the university released a video showing the hand in action. The study behind it is by Amirhossein Kazemipour, Hehui Zheng and Robert Katzschmann.
It is based on an off-the-shelf robot hand made by Wuji. On its back the team mounted a roughly 80-gram 'backpack' with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W mini computer, a motion sensor and a small battery – untethered, the hand weighs just under a kilogram. It learned its gait through reinforcement learning in a simulation; a neural network then controls it 50 times per second. Standard reward rules for four-legged walking robots did not work because the fingers differ in length, so the researchers developed their own.
In tests the hand crawled over 14 surfaces, including metal grates, artificial turf and loose gravel, and righted itself after falls. It pressed arrow keys on a keyboard, landing 29 of 32 presses to play the puzzle game Sokoban. Possible uses include cramped spaces such as damaged buildings or pipe networks. The team says it has not yet demonstrated automatic detaching from and reattaching to a robot body.