This detached hand robot has a thing for skittering on its fingertips

If The Addams Family was a science fiction show, “Thing” might look something like this.

Researchers have developed a robotic hand that can not only skitter about on its fingertips, it can also bend its fingers backward, connect and disconnect from a robotic arm and pick up and carry one or more objects at a time, researchers report January 20 in Nature Communications. With its unusual agility, it could navigate and retrieve objects in spaces too confined for human hands.

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