Here’s some nightmare fuel from the world of robotics: a robot arm with a six-fingered hand that can detach itself and crawl around on its own.
The contraption is the invention of a team from the School of Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, who presented their work in a paper published earlier this month in Nature Communications. The researchers just released a video of it in action, and it really drives home the fact that this thing belongs in a horror movie, not the staid pages of a science journal.
It’s bad enough that the hand has six—not five!—prehensile fingers. The paper explains that this particular design choice was made to improve on the all-too-human limitations of our piddling single thumb: “Human-like asymmetry and reliance on a single thumb limit applications that require symmetry or modularity.” Sure. Who hasn’t wished for multiple thumbs at some point? The video duly illustrates the advantages of the six-fingered design, demonstrating how it allows the hand to pick up an apple and an orange while still leaving two fingers free to pick up… other fruit, presumably.
But then the arm places itself gently onto a table, waits a moment, and then withdraws—leaving the hand in place. It’s at this point that the hand jumps up and starts crawling gleefully around on its own. Watch as two of the fingers grab a couple of wooden blocks while the other four continue to act as legs! Marvel as three fingers grab a bottle of mustard while the other three snag a tube of Pringles! And then try to sleep without dreaming of the ghastly thing!
In all seriousness, this is clearly an incredible piece of technology, and the fact that the hand is so terrifying is a testament to its lifelike and uncannily organic movements. And you can certainly see potential applications for a device like this—the paper suggests “industrial, service, and exploratory robotics” as sectors that could find a use for it, while the video goes further with the unnerving prospect of the hand being attached to a prosthetic limb. But it’s not the potential uses for this thing that stick with you—it’s the sight of it crawling around like the offspring of an unholy coupling between an insect and an octopus.
“Human hands are incredible tools,” gushes the accompanying text on YouTube, “but they have their limits… fundamentally, they’re connected to our arms.” Well, quite.
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