Boston Dynamics humanoid robot gets new hands for heavy lifting

Boston Dynamics has introduced a significant upgrade to its humanoid robot Atlas by developing a new three-fingered gripper designed to improve its ability to handle both delicate and heavy objects. Unlike attempts to fully replicate the human hand, the company focused on creating a rugged, reliable gripper with seven degrees of freedom and seven actuators, including an articulated thumb joint. This design enhances Atlas’s dexterity, allowing it to perform complex tasks such as sorting, picking, packing, and manipulating objects with precision. The gripper also incorporates tactile sensing on the fingertips and cameras embedded in the palm, enabling the robot to adjust its grip based on the shape and delicacy of items. In addition to hardware improvements, Boston Dynamics has partnered with the Toyota Research Institute to develop a Large Behavior Model (LBM), an AI system trained on extensive human action datasets. This AI enables Atlas to understand, generate, and adapt human-like behaviors without the need for manual programming of each task. Demonstrations showed Atlas performing tasks such