Armless robotic hand crawls on its fingers, gets back up after a fall and types on a keyboard

With no cable attached, the hand crawls, changes direction and gets back up after a fall. While carrying its own weight, it presses successive keys on a keyboard and pushes an object towards designated targets.

The hand carries its own power supply and computing, which lets it work as an autonomous platform.

It typed a sequence of keyboard commands without using vision. In another demonstration, an overhead view guided it as it pushed an object to target positions.

Training took place in simulation, in an environment calibrated from measurements taken on the real hand. According to the researchers, their reward formulation let the hand move faster in simulation than calibrated rewards originally designed for quadruped robots.

The work is presented in a paper titled “Fingers as Legs”, written by Amirhossein Kazemipour, Hehui Zheng and Robert Katzschmann.