Boston Dynamics Details New Atlas Hand: 13 DOF, Four Fingers, Sim-to-Real RL

Last week, Boston Dynamics Inc. unveiled a new humanoid robot hand. The four-fingered hand has 13 degrees of freedom (DoF) and is directly actuated.

The company said it designed the hand for mass manufacturing.

Several details stand out immediately. Boston Dynamics dropped the pinky finger and reduced the gripper’s size.

Less obviously, the company said it built the new hand for high-fidelity simulation, enabling sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL).

The Robot Report spoke with Alberto Rodriguez to learn more about the new hand.

Rodriguez is the director of robot behavior for Atlas at Boston Dynamics.

Q: What did Boston Dynamics learn from its humanoid trials that it applied to the new hand?

Rodriguez said a product roadmap for Atlas helped the company make hard decisions about the right level of complexity for the hand. It navigated tradeoffs among dexterity, strength, ruggedness, cost, reparability, and sensing.

Lessons from Atlas’ body included simplicity, modularity, and actuator maturity. A reliable robot captures data faster, runs more experiments, and enables early deployments. Modularity focuses energy on fewer things.

The new hand uses 13 identical actuators, fully encapsulated, with no fragile cables crossing joints. Earlier hands were strong enough to lift 100 lb.-plus, so strength was not increased; instead, actuation transparency was improved. Earlier hands struggled with complex tasks, influencing the current design.