Boston Dynamics Drops the Pinky From Atlas, Doubles Hand Joints to 13

Boston Dynamics unveiled a redesigned hand for its electric Atlas humanoid on Oct. 1, with four fingers and 13 degrees of freedom, up from seven on the previous version, according to IEEE Spectrum. The company said it designed the hand around mass production rather than around a copy of the human one.

The number that matters here is not the joint count but the actuator count behind it. Each of the three fingers has three degrees of freedom and the thumb has four, per The Robot Report, and every joint is driven by a directly coupled actuator with no cables or tendons crossing it.

What the 13 joints are

The split is simple enough to put in a table.

Digit	Degrees of freedom	Count
Thumb	4	1
Finger	3	3
Pinky	none	0

That sums to 13. The earlier hand had seven and was built to grasp a wide variety of objects; this one is built to manipulate them, with the thumb able to slide along the length and width of the other fingers, per The Robot Report. Boston Dynamics lists pinch grasps, tripod grasps and trigger grips for drills, torque drivers, grinders, nail guns and welding torches.

1. Previous Atlas hand7 DOF
2. New Atlas hand13 DOF

Source: IEEE Spectrum, accessed 2026-10-06

Why the pinky went

Boston Dynamics tested the question on people. Zachary Jackowski, the company's chief product and technology officer, ran an experiment in which team members taped down their pinkies, according to The Robot Report. Dylan Thrush, a mechanical engineer on the project, told the publication the pinky was cut because "the additional dexterity" was "not worth the extra complexity."

Alberto Rodriguez, Boston Dynamics' director of robot behavior, framed it as a trade. "Hands are a ruthless design trade-off," he told IEEE Spectrum, adding that you are "always giving up on something." Fewer, larger actuators mean fewer parts to fail. IEEE Spectrum reports that each actuator pack is a single replaceable unit, and the hand carries dense pressure sensors across the fingertips and palm.

The fingers can also splay beyond what a human hand can do. Rodriguez said the team expects reinforcement learning to exploit those motions.

The 100,000-a-year target

The production claim is the part to read carefully. Rodriguez told IEEE Spectrum the team is working out what has to change "if we want to make 100,000 of these hands a year." That is a design goal phrased as a conditional, not a manufacturing plan, and neither source gives a date, a supplier or a factory.

A week before the hand was shown, Boston Dynamics opened a Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America in Georgia, a training site for integrating its robots into manufacturing, per The Robot Report. Neither article says the new hand has been installed in Georgia or anywhere else.

Several numbers a buyer would ask for are missing from both articles:

• Grip force and payload per hand: not published.
• Unit cost or target cost: not published.
• Hands deployed outside the lab: not reported.
• Whether the tool-use demonstrations ran autonomously or under teleoperation: not specified in either article.

A demo of a welding torch is a demo of a hand. It says nothing about how many hours a day the hand survives on a customer floor, which is the denominator that sets the cost of a humanoid fleet. For comparison, the Figure F02 fleet that ran at BMW was judged on deployment records, and RoboCo's $1 billion secondary was priced on a ship date.

What would change this read is a published mean time between failures for the actuator pack, or a named customer line running the hand for a full shift. Boston Dynamics has not said when either will exist.