ETH Zurich's new humanoid robotic hand can walk autonomously, press keys, and move objects

ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab taught an off-the-shelf humanoid robotic hand to walk autonomously, press arrow keys, and push blocks. With a battery, motion sensors, and a microcomputer added to the back of the hand, and after reinforcement learning training in simulation, the hand crawled on 14 indoor and outdoor surfaces, and recovered its standing posture on its own in 21 of 25 sideways-fall tests. It pressed the correct arrow key 29 out of 32 times. In 15 tests, the block was pushed to within 2 centimeters of the target. The paper Fingers as Legs has been published on arXiv.