This Disembodied Hand Is All the Robot You Need

ETH Zurich researchers turned an off-the-shelf robotic hand into a self-contained mobile manipulator, adding an 80-gram backpack with a battery, IMU, and Raspberry Pi Zero. Reinforcement learning trained it to crawl and perform separate skills including righting itself, pressing keys, and pushing objects. In tests, it crossed 14 surfaces at an average 9 cm/s and pushed a 41-gram cube to targets up to 40 cm away in 15 consecutive trials.