Robotic hand learns to thread a needle and embroider silk, a craft more than 2,500 years old

The hand learned to separate strands of silk, thread a needle, stretch fabric over a frame and sew. The craft has more than 2,500 years of history.

Agilink does not say which model it used, but New Atlas recognises the OmniHand 3 Ultra-M: a hand the size of a human hand, weighing 630 g, whose motors drive the joints directly, without tendons.

According to the company, each fingertip measures force in three dimensions and detects deformations of 0.08 mm, enough to tell an object that is slipping from a simple light touch.

Boston Dynamics took the opposite approach to sophistication for the new hand of its Atlas robot, which has only four fingers. Its engineers spent a day with the little finger and ring finger taped down, and the little finger was then removed from the design.