It’s been just over 12 years since Boston Dynamics unveiled its bipedal Atlas robot, and along the way it’s made huge advances in both mobility and AI capabilities.
A new video (top) shared by the Massachusetts-based team on Wednesday highlights the progress made on one of the most challenging areas of a humanoid robot — the hands.
Instead of trying to precisely emulate a human hand, Boston Dynamics is focusing on developing a dexterous gripper that’s both rugged and reliable, making it ideal for tasks such as sorting, picking and packing, as well as handling heavy objects.
“Grippers are one of the most intricate components of a humanoid robot,” Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior for Atlas, says in the video. “We have to put in a lot of actuation and sensing into a very small space, so it’s a very hard design problem.”
Karl Price, mechanical engineer for Atlas, showed off the new, three-fingered gripper for the Atlas robot.
The second-generation device has seven degrees of freedom and seven different actuators — two for each of the fingers and one for the newly added articulated thumb joint. It also has tactile sensing on the fingertips and cameras in the palm.
Not surprisingly, the addition of the thumb has significantly boosted the humanoid robot’s abilities.
“That really expands the type of grasps that it allows us to do,” Rodriguez said. “Over the last year or so, we’ve realized that we can grasp almost anything that we throw at it.”
The Atlas team settled on the idea of adding three fingers because it believed it was the fewest number required to complete a range of complex manipulation tasks, while the thumb allows for precise and careful handling of more delicate objects.
The current goal, Rodriguez said, is to create a gripper “with the right sweet spot of dexterity, actuation, and sensing,” adding that his team is “very excited to see where it takes us.”
Boston Dynamics is one of a growing number of companies working on humanoid robots that could one day transform the workplace, especially in industrial settings. Some companies are also developing robots for domestic use, with California-based Figure expected to make a big announcement on the subject later this week.
