It looks like Thing from The Addams Family: a robot hand, all on its own, scuttling across the floor on its fingertips. Researchers at ETH Zurich’s Soft Robotics Lab took a ready-made robot hand, strapped a tiny computer to its back and taught it to walk, get up after a fall, push objects and even type on a keyboard, IEEE’s robotics society reported. The videos went viral again at the end of October.
Why it matters: most robots are built for one body and one job. This hand shows that the same part can do very different things, walking one moment and handling objects the next. A big robot could one day send its hand into a gap it can’t fit through, then call it back.
The robot
The team didn’t build a new hand. They used an off-the-shelf model from the company Wuji, with five fingers and 20 motorised joints, four in each finger. On its back sits an 80-gram “backpack” with a battery, a motion sensor and a Raspberry Pi Zero, a computer the size of a stick of gum. In all, it weighs about 818 grams, Gizmodo notes.
The tricky part: a hand isn’t built like an animal. The thumb sits apart and the fingers have different lengths, so no ready-made walking pattern fits. “Getting a robotic hand to walk is actually pretty challenging,” says lead researcher Amirhossein Kazemipour, a doctoral candidate at the lab, UPI reports.
How it learned to walk
Nobody programmed each step. The hand practised in a computer simulation, thousands of virtual copies at once, using reinforcement learning: it tried movements and was rewarded for the ones that moved it forward. Small “virtual springs” helped it hold a crawling stance, and it was nudged to avoid wobbling sideways. The team trained four separate skills (walking, getting back up, pressing keys and pushing objects), and a controller on the little computer switches between them.
What it can do
- Walk almost anywhere: it crossed 14 different surfaces, including grass, gravel, asphalt, tiles and metal grating.
- Turn and keep going: it turns left and right at an average of about 9 centimetres per second.
- Get back up: after a fall it righted itself in 21 of 25 tries.
- Push things: guided by an overhead camera, it pushed a 41-gram cube to targets up to 40 centimetres away, 15 times in a row.
- Use a keyboard: it pressed keys and even finished a level of the puzzle game Sokoban with the arrow keys.
The doubts
Other experts like the idea but see work ahead. Masahiko Inami of the University of Tokyo told IEEE the hand would need its own eyes and sturdier navigation to be useful, and his colleague Hideki Shimobayashi pointed out that walking loads a hand differently from gripping, so it may wear out faster. Columbia’s Matei Ciocarlie simply called it a “cool result.”
What happens next
The team wants to give the hand its own camera so it can find objects by itself, and to improve how it turns. Kazemipour talks about robots whose parts change roles depending on the task. Assistant professor Robert Katzschmann sees a practical use: a small hand that can reach confined spaces, such as disaster sites, where a big robot can’t go.
Read next
- Robot hand learns to stop dropping things, palm down
- Humanoid robot learns to walk and grab from separate lessons
- Robot thinks a chimney is a squirrel, then fixes its own memory
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Sources
- This disembodied hand is all the robot you need, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, 8 October 2026
- Thing 2.0? This creepy-cute robot walks on its fingers, Gizmodo, 22 September 2026
- Swiss researchers unveil robot hand that walks on its fingers, UPI, 30 October 2026
