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What just happened? Halloween isn't here yet, but researchers have already unveiled a robotic hand that can detach itself and crawl around on tiny, leg-like fingers to access objects out of reach. The design comes from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and is as creepy as it sounds.
Despite their speed and strength, traditional robot arms are usually bolted in place for stability, limiting their reach. The EPFL team aimed to create a bimodal hand that could not only grasp objects powerfully but also break free for limited mobility when needed. This led to the development of the "Handcrawler," which was recently presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
From an engineering perspective, grasping and crawling have a lot in common. Both require appendages that can bend and contort. The Handcrawler's finger-legs are designed with this versatility in mind, curling backward as easily as they curl forward to maximize grasping potential. Thanks to this design, it can grab multiple objects simultaneously without needing to twist the entire arm around to line up the free fingers.
A video shared by the researchers shows the Handcrawler in action. It would have been even more impressive if the arm could launch the hand forward, but for now, it just gently detaches. That's when the real action begins.
Once separated from the arm, the hand comes alive, crawling around in various eerie motions. Normally, it utilizes all five finger-legs for mobility, but one of the demonstrations showed it managing just fine on three fingers while the other two grasped a small object.
While controlled manually in early videos, Xiao Gao, one of the researchers behind the Handcrawler, says they already have an autonomous version working in the lab. It can run the full detachment, crawl, grab, and reattachment sequence on its own with external location tracking.
The Handcrawler expands our understanding of what is possible for robotic capabilities in industrial and manufacturing settings. Now, all it needs is a mind of its own to compete with the character 'Thing' from The Addams Family.