Boston Dynamics on October 1, 2026 announced a redesigned hand for its Atlas humanoid robot that prioritizes durability and manufacturability over human-like appearance, according to IEEE Spectrum.
The three-finger-and-thumb design increases the degrees of freedom from 7 to 13, a move the company says will allow the hand to perform industrial tasks while being cost-effective to mass-produce.
Humanoid robotics firms have largely focused on anthropomorphic hands that resemble human hands, but those designs remain fragile and expensive. Boston Dynamics instead aims for a product that can be made at scale—up to 100,000 units a year—and withstand real-world use, IEEE Spectrum reported.
“Hands are a ruthless design trade-off,” Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior at Boston Dynamics, told IEEE Spectrum. “Many of the current designs are giving up on things like reliability and manufacturability.”
The company eliminated the pinky finger after an experiment in which team members taped their own pinkies to their ring fingers, but kept the thumb and three main fingers, adding the ability for the fingers to splay apart. Rodriguez said that splay capability, combined with reinforcement learning, could unlock “superhuman” dexterity.
The new hand uses a direct-drive configuration with each actuator mounted in the joint, eliminating delicate tendons or cables that cross joints. That choice improves ruggedness and simplifies repair, the company argues, key for logistics or manufacturing deployments.
Boston Dynamics provided no third-party performance data or pricing, and did not specify when the hand will be commercially available. The new hand replaces a three-fingered research prototype never intended for mass production.
Rodriguez said the hand is close enough to human form factor that training data from human demonstrations can be used, but omits purely cosmetic features. “We’re convinced that from a product perspective, this hand should be able to do everything we need it to do for the foreseeable horizon,” he said.