Severed robot hand looks like a futuristic Thing from ‘The Addams Family’

The hand-shaped robot was tested on 14 different terrains and can easily recover from a fall and lift itself up right from a flat position Image: Soft Robotics Lab/ETH Zurich Halloween is just around the corner, which means it’s the perfect time to present another undeniably spooky robot. Or, more specifically, an Addams Family-inspired detached robot hand. Like its gothic sitcom predecessor, this fully articulated appendage can balance on its own fingertips and creep around. This horror hand goes a step further, though. It has enough finesse to tap keyboard keys, push small objects, and even play a rudimentary computer game all while balancing on its remaining fingers. And good luck trying to swat this Thing doppelgänger away. It can easily recover from a fall and lift itself up right from a flat position. This Robotic Hand Walks on Its Fingertips Human hands weren’t meant for walking Interestingly enough, this isn’t the first time engineers have toyed with the idea of a walking robot hand. Past efforts mostly worked, but they required altering the hand’s structure, making each finger the same length so it could balance. That’s still an impressive feat, but it’s a significant design compromise. Human hands are defined by their uneven fingers and opposite thumb. This asymmetry partly explains why we’re so adept at handling a wide variety of tools, but that unevenness isn’t well suited for upright walking. A team of engineers from the Soft Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich in Switzerland set out to solve that admittedly extremely niche problem, they describe in a recent preprint (a paper that has not undergone peer-review or been accepted for publication in a scientific journal). The team started by acquiring an off-the-shelf mechanical hand designed for humanoid robots, featuring five fingers and 20 actuated joints. Then came the additions. The team mounted a battery, several motion sensors, and a tiny computer to the back of the robot, near where it would normally connect to a wrist. With its new accessories, the whole thing weighs 1.8 pounds With the hardware in place, the team tackled the tricky business of teaching their hand how to balance, a first step toward walking. They trained it in a simulation environment using reinforcement learning, where the software rewarded the hand every time it correctly balanced on its uneven fingers. To accommodate the unusual morphology, the training also taught the software each finger’s unique timing. Every finger was assigned its own target position, so where and when each one moved varied depending on the task at hand. Confident in their creepy hand, the team then put it through the wringer in real-world field tests. The hand traversed 14 different indoor and outdoor environments featuring a variety of surface textures, tiptoeing (or really, tip-fingering) its way across carpet, gravel, grass, and metal with a springy, spider-like gait. The team didn’t stop at just asking their version of Thing to walk, though. The robot hand could also balance on several fingers while using the remaining ones to push a small cube forward. Using a similar technique, it could stay while typing out keys on a keyboard. It turns out the disembodied hand is a surprisingly adept typist. In testing, it correctly hit keys 29 out of 32 times, a better typing accuracy than some professional writers. It was even able to successfully play the puzzle-solving video game Sokoban by pressing the correct arrow keys in sequence. Giving humanoid robots a helping hand The team notes that all of these features may serve a more important purpose than merely creating a creepy and kooky new Halloween decoration. In the future, humanoid robots working in cramped areas could reach toward a spot they can’t get to, detach their hand, and send it crawling off to retrieve an item. That’s an undeniably unsettling image, but it could also potentially mean the end of annoyingly lost screwdrivers. Refinements in individual finger articulation and balance, meanwhile, may also enhance robot hands more broadly, making robots more skilled at handling objects designed for human hands. “Giving robotic hands their own mobility could make future robots more versatile in the spaces and interfaces built for people,” the researchers write in the paper. Given current trends, there likely won’t be any shortage of robots in need of a helping hand. Companies like Figure and Tesla are racing to build bipedal, human-ish-looking robots that they hope will one day operate in factories, warehouses, and even side by side with people in their homes. Though these robots are still in their infancy and often still require remote operation by human operators, there are signs that companies are committed to pushing them out sooner rather than later. Toyota reportedly began instructing human workers to teach robots a growing range of tasks in September. The world’s largest automaker reportedly will spend $6.42 billion every year starting in 2028 to upgrade factories with an increasingly robotic workforce. 2026 Popular Science Home of the Future Awards 39 products that will improve your everyday life.