Atlas Loses Its Pinky: Boston Dynamics' 13-Joint Hand Is Built Around a 100,000-a-Year Target

Boston Dynamics unveiled a redesigned hand for its Atlas humanoid on October 1, with a thumb, three fingers and 13 degrees of freedom (independent joint motions), according to The Robot Report. The previous Atlas hand had 7, per IEEE Spectrum ("A Robust Robot Hand Engineered for Mass Production").

The number that matters here is not 13 but 100,000. Alberto Rodriguez, Boston Dynamics' director of robot behavior, told IEEE Spectrum the engineering effort now centres on what must change in the fine details of the design to build that many hands a year.

What the 13-joint Atlas hand is made of

The thumb carries 4 degrees of freedom and each of the three fingers carries 3, which sums to 13. The thumb can slide along both the length and the width of the other fingers, which lets Atlas form pinch grasps against any finger and tripod grasps with three.

1. Thumb4 DOF
2. Finger 13 DOF
3. Finger 23 DOF
4. Finger 33 DOF

Source: The Robot Report, accessed 2026-10-04

The actuators are direct-drive, meaning each joint is moved by a motor at the joint rather than by tendons run from the forearm. IEEE Spectrum describes fewer, larger and more powerful actuators embedded in the joints, with no delicate tendons crossing them. The Robot Report adds that the actuators are fully encapsulated, with no exposed cables, and that the fingertips and palm carry dense pressure sensors.

That is a reliability argument. A tendon stretches and a cable fatigues; a sealed motor module can be swapped. IEEE Spectrum reports the modules are meant to be easily replaceable.

Why there is no pinky

Boston Dynamics removed the fifth finger after an experiment. Rodriguez said his team spent a day with their pinkies taped to their ring fingers and found the missing digit blocked none of the jobs they cared about.

His framing of the trade-off is the line worth keeping: "Hands are a ruthless design trade-off. There's no way around it, you're always giving up on something." Every finger removed is one fewer actuator to build, buy, calibrate and replace across a fleet.

The design also does something a human hand cannot. The fingers can splay apart, and Rodriguez said that opens motions a reinforcement-learning policy can discover on its own. The hand was designed to be simulated accurately so those policies transfer to hardware.

Which numbers are published

Item	Published	Source
Degrees of freedom	13, up from 7	IEEE Spectrum
Fingers	3 plus a thumb	The Robot Report
Annual build target	100,000 hands	IEEE Spectrum
Weight, grip force, price	Not given	Both

The Robot Report notes that no mass, payload, torque, speed or price figures came with the announcement. Without those, the hand cannot be compared with rivals on the denominator that decides factory economics: dollars per hand over its service life.

Where it is meant to work

The Robot Report ties the hand to automotive manufacturing, including Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America in Georgia. The tools Atlas can operate with it include drills, power torque drivers, grinders, nail guns and welding torches.

That list is a capability claim from the vendor, shown in company-produced demonstrations. It is not a count of units working a shift. For deployment figures on a rival humanoid, see our report on Figure's retired F.02 fleet; for the training side, Runway's open-weight robot model.

What would change this read

A published mean time between failures for the hand would do it. So would a price per unit at volume. If Boston Dynamics reports either, the 100,000 target becomes a cost curve rather than an ambition. Until then it is a number the company says it is designing toward, with no date attached.