Only a couple weeks removed from seeing a bunch of weird robots at CES, scientists have unveiled a new innovation in the world of creepy robotics — the detachable crawling robotic hand.
Of course, one person’s creepy is another person’s awesome, and it’s an impressive little bot that invites an instant comparison to Thing, the sentient, crawling hand from The Addams Family.
As published in Nature Communications, a group of scientists, and first author Xiao Gao, recently unveiled the new type of robotic hand. Videos published alongside the paper show how the hand can detach itself from its arm and use its fingers to crawl around like a spider.
The detachable robot isn’t constrained by the limitations of the human hand. While its six fingers aren’t too far off from the five digits on our own hands, everything else about this little creepy crawler is pretty divergent. For instance, the fingers can bend backwards as well as they bend forwards, so the robot can hold objects against both sides of its base (or palm, if you want to map it to human anatomy) at the same time. It’s even capable of carrying small objects on its back (or belly) while it does so, using its free fingers for locomotion.
Obviously, these features would be most useful in industrial settings, but maybe someday robots like this will find their way into regular people’s homes, too.
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