Boston Dynamics Redesigns Atlas Hand: 13 Degrees of Freedom, Built for Mass Manufacturing

Boston Dynamics has redesigned its humanoid robot hand, and the engineering choices reveal a deliberate shift in philosophy: simpler, tougher, and built to scale. The new hand carries 13 degrees of freedom, is directly actuated, and remains capable of handling over 100 lb — all while being designed explicitly for mass manufacturing.

Designing for Scale, Not Complexity

The most visible change is what Boston Dynamics removed. The company dropped the pinky finger and reduced the size of the gripper, simplifying the overall package. That wasn't a compromise — it was a product decision, according to Alberto Rodriguez, Director of Robot Behavior for Atlas at Boston Dynamics.

"Having a product roadmap for Atlas has been a key enabler when it came to making hard decisions like what is the right level of complexity that we should be packing into a hand and navigating its design tradeoff between dexterity, strength, ruggedness, cost, reparability, and sensing."

Rodriguez said lessons from the broader Atlas platform shaped the hand's architecture.

"We have learned things from the design of Atlas' body. There are things like simplicity, modularity, and actuator maturity that make sense in theory, but over time, you start appreciating the huge impact they have in the velocity you can move."

That philosophy is visible in the hardware itself.

"We have used the same philosophy with this hand. It is built out of 13 identical actuators, all completely encapsulated, with no fragile cables crossing joints, which is already paying off."

For manufacturing engineers, the implications are significant: identical, encapsulated actuators and no cables crossing joints point directly at reduced assembly complexity and improved serviceability.

Why In-House?

Boston Dynamics considered off-the-shelf end effectors but rejected the approach.

"We always look at what is out there to understand the state-of-the-art. Hands are a key piece of technology that are so integral to the value proposition of humanoids that it would be very difficult for us to approach it in any other way than in-house."

Simulation-First Engineering

The hand is designed for high-fidelity simulation to enable sim-to-real reinforcement learning, with backdrivability and transparency built into the actuation and transmission.

"We design the actuation and transmission with an eye to backdrivability and transparency. On the controls side, we have developed techniques to compensate for some of the remaining non-idealities on the actuators, like compensating for different types of friction."

That design allows reinforcement learning to train policies using proprioception — the actuators themselves sense external forces — and transfer those policies directly to hardware.

Testing and Deployment Status

Boston Dynamics has tested the hand on industrial tasks including using handheld power tools, handling cables, and fishing for screws. The design was influenced by challenges earlier hands faced with complex tasks, and the design process combined intuition, concept designs, and a suite of representative tasks.

The hand has been used extensively at Boston Dynamics' headquarters but has not yet been deployed to the whole robot fleet — a rollout the company is approaching deliberately.