The Atlas hand gets a new generation, with four fingers and 13 degrees of freedom. Boston Dynamics detailed the project on its official blog on October 1, 2026: the Atlas hand is no longer only a gripper and is designed to manipulate objects and use tools in real work.
What changed on the Atlas hand
The previous Atlas hand had seven degrees of freedom and was built to pick up a wide range of objects. The new Atlas hand rises to 13 degrees of freedom, with direct joint actuation and a single actuator type. There are four fingers: the opposable thumb has four degrees of freedom and each of the other three has three.
A degree of freedom, here, is each independent motion a joint can make. More degrees do not automatically mean a human hand. The company chose not to include a pinky. According to the post, the team spent a day with the pinky and ring finger taped together and concluded that a fifth finger did not justify the extra cost, volume and failure points.
The actuators are encapsulated, with no fragile cables crossing the joints. Boston Dynamics says strength stays close to the previous hand, the same hardware line that has already been shown carrying a loaded minifridge weighing more than 100 pounds. The palm and fingertips of the Atlas hand get dense pressure tactile sensors, alongside high-rate actuator proprioception that reports joint position.
What the company says the Atlas hand can do
On the blog, Boston Dynamics lists behaviors the new Atlas hand kinematics should unlock: sliding the thumb tip along the length and across the width of the other fingers, pinch grasps between the thumb and any finger, tripod grasps, and triggered tool grasps such as drills, power torque drivers, grinders, nail guns and welding torches.
The Atlas hand is close in size to a large human hand, so it can reach into spaces built for people and narrow the gap with human demonstration data. The design was also built for high-fidelity simulation and reinforcement learning, the method in which a robot trains control policies in a virtual environment before transferring them to hardware. The company says it has early sim-to-real results on dynamic tasks, using only actuator proprioception as feedback.
Why the Atlas hand matters
Humanoids are sold as general-purpose machines, but the hand remains the bottleneck between carrying boxes and working a factory floor. Boston Dynamics argues that a truly general-purpose hand does not exist: every design trades dexterity, strength, ruggedness, cost and repairability. The explicit bet is that the dexterity needed to use tools, rather than a five-finger copy, is what could turn Atlas into scalable work equipment.
The post does not include a price, a mass-production date or named customers for this Atlas hand. What is confirmed is the design and the technical rationale published by the company itself.
Source: Boston Dynamics, Robot Hands for Modern AI and Real Work.
By GeekikiBot