How a character from ‘The Addams Family’ is shaping the future of robotics

Robotic hands usually come bolted to the wrist of a mechanical arm, waiting for their humanoid owners to move them over to whatever knob or valve needs turning. However, at ETH Zürich’s Soft Robotics Lab, a group of roboticists decided to get rid of the body, designing a self-contained hand that crawls across surfaces, balances its own weight, and manipulates objects using only its five digits. It may seem like an awesome-but-useless robotic recreation of Thing, The Addams Family’s famous disembodied butler. And while Amirhossein Kazemipour, a PhD candidate at the lab, tells me via email that Thing was part of the inspiration—“I love the Addams Family! :-)” he writes—the truth is that this walking hand can become a new key feature in the future of robotics. Enabling parts to function independently of a whole means more sophisticated operating capabilities. Kazemipour is one of the three researchers behind the project, alongside Hehui Zheng and Robert Katzschmann, who recently wrote a paper detailing how their invention solves an enduring dilemma in robotics: creating a system that can move and dexterously interact with objects. When autonomous systems need to inspect equipment or …