October 9, 2026
Atlas's hand now has four fingers: 13 degrees of freedom instead of seven
Boston Dynamics removed the pinky from Atlas's hand: four fingers give 13 degrees of freedom instead of the previous seven. The vendor said so in a blog post on Oct 2, and The Robot Report spoke with Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior for Atlas.
The hand had 7 degrees of freedom and now has 13: four for the thumb and three for each of the other three fingers. A fifth finger would cost three more actuators, while four fingers allow in-hand reorientation, recovery from slips and work with tool triggers.
Alberto Rodriguez describes the design as a trade-off: “There's always some intuition and experimentation; it all comes down to balancing competing goals.” Those goals include dexterity, strength, durability, cost, serviceability and sensing.
The hand is a bit larger than an average human hand and on average somewhat stronger. In a demo, it carries a loaded mini-fridge weighing more than 100 pounds, which is more than 45 kilograms.
The hand is built for high-fidelity simulation for reinforcement learning and synthetic data. The vendor describes promising sim-to-real transfer on dynamic tasks but gives no success figures.
No price given. The hand is designed for mass production and low-cost repair, but the vendor does not state a price or a release timeline.
There are no success figures for sim-to-real transfer yet.