Boston Dynamics Cuts the Pinky: New Atlas Hand Has 13 DoF, Targets 100K Units a Year
lukas_m_ziegler · x · 2026-10-13
Boston Dynamics has deliberately abandoned the five-finger humanoid hand race, unveiling a new three-finger-plus-thumb Atlas hand built for industrial durability rather than human mimicry.
Key specs and design tradeoffs:
- 13 degrees of freedom, nearly double the previous hand
- Fewer, bigger motors built directly into the joints — no tendons to snap
- Each motor pack swaps out as a single unit for easy repair
- Fingers splay wider than a human hand, and RL finds uses for the extra range
- Target: 100,000 hands per year
The team even taped their own pinkies to ring fingers for a day to test what they'd lose. The engineering philosophy: not "how do we make it look human" but "how do we make it work, survive and scale in a factory."
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