Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news

How a character from 'The Addams Family' is shaping the future of robotics (Fast Company)

From the article:

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 flip switches inside cramped enclosures, their operators are typically forced to thread long, unwieldy mechanical booms through the gap or park bulky rovers right at the threshold.

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Instead of forcing the fingers into an artificial, rigid stepping rhythm, the team trained an AI in a simulated physics engine using deep reinforcement learning, the digital trial-and-error process where virtual hands learn through millions of practice steps. Using mathematical guides, the system anchors each fingertip to a home position and allows the digits to take long forward strides while stopping the fingers from sprawling sideways or letting the chassis buckle.

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When they tested the model, it worked. And yes, it behaved pretty much like the actual Thing from TV and the movies.

After they got it working, they managed to implement it all without an umbilical cord connected to an off-board computer. A cable would have defeated the purpose of developing a detachable, fully independent hand; the robot needed to run on its own.

To accomplish this, the team took an off-the-shelf robotic hand and mounted a custom 80 gram (3 oz.) backpack containing a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a tiny single-board computer; an inertial measurement unit, or IMU, the kind of motion-and-tilt sensor found in a smartphone; and a small lithium-polymer battery. The solution ended up as an untethered, fully independent platform weighing just shy of 2 pounds.

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“Longer term, imagine a robot leaving its hand near a tight opening, letting it crawl inside to operate a control or move an object, then picking it up afterwards,” he says. That operational approach could assist emergency workers evaluating damaged buildings, technicians inspecting pipe networks, or automated factory stations where clearances are too narrow for standard articulated arms.

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But that’s way ahead from where we are. For now, the lab is exploring onboard visual tracking to eliminate overhead localization cameras, along with automated mechanisms for docking.

Doodlepalooza in Las Vegas

A total of 296 dogs gathered at Cowabunga Vegas water park for the event, which was presented by sponsor We Love Doodles. An official adjudicator with Guinness World Records was on site to certify the tally, which surpassed the prior record of 276 dogs set by Chewy in Coral Gables, Florida, in May.