Atlas's New Hand Has 13 Degrees of Freedom and No Pinky, and Boston Dynamics Has Published No Task-Success Rate

Boston Dynamics gave its Atlas humanoid a four-finger hand with 13 degrees of freedom on Oct. 1, up from 7 in the previous design, and left out the pinky because the added dexterity was "not worth the extra complexity," according to Dylan Thrush, a mechanical engineer on the Atlas team.

This account rests on two trade-press write-ups of the company's announcement, The Robot Report and Humanoids Daily. The Terminal did not retrieve the company's own post, so every specification below is as those two outlets report it.

What the 13 degrees of freedom are made of

The thumb has 4 degrees of freedom and each of the other three fingers has 3, which sums to 13. The fingers can also spread apart, and the thumb can slide along and across them. Each joint is directly actuated with a single actuator type, the hardware is encapsulated, and no cables cross a joint, according to The Robot Report.

Dense pressure sensors cover the fingertips and palm. Neither outlet gives a sensor count or a resolution.

	Previous Atlas hand	New Atlas hand
Degrees of freedom	7	13
Digits	Three, with a thumb	Four, with a 4-DOF thumb
Design goal	Grasp a wide range of objects	Manipulate objects and tools

The Robot Report describes the earlier hand as built to grasp and the new one as built to manipulate. That is the real change, and 13 versus 7 is only its shadow. Related hardware coverage: the Teradyne and Elite Robots cobot settlement and TDK's retinal-projection glasses.

1. Previous hand7 DOF
2. New hand13 DOF
3. New hand plus a pinky16 DOF

Source: The Robot Report, Oct. 1, 2026; the 16 is our arithmetic, adding the 3 DOF Thrush says a pinky would cost

Why the pinky went

Thrush says a fifth finger would add 3 degrees of freedom, and Humanoids Daily adds that it would mean three more actuators, with the cost, size and failure risk that come with them. Zachary Jackowski, Boston Dynamics' chief product and technology officer, had the team tape their pinky and ring fingers together for a day. The team then agreed the hand did not need one.

The hand is roughly the size of a large human hand, so it fits human-scale tools and workstations. Boston Dynamics says strength is comparable to the previous hand. The supporting example is Atlas carrying a loaded mini-fridge of more than 100 pounds, per Humanoids Daily, which is a whole-robot carry and not a per-hand payload rating.

What it is built to do

The tasks listed are in-hand reorientation, pinch and tripodal grasps, recovery from a slipping grasp, and holding a drill, power torque driver, grinder, nail gun or welding torch while pressing its trigger. Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior for Atlas, described the design as "a trade of different competing objectives," per The Robot Report.

The hand was designed around simulation. Because the drive is rigid and backdrivable, and control methods compensate for cogging and friction, the team can simulate it with high fidelity and train with randomised motor torque, friction, object shape and disturbances. Early results show "promising sim2real transfer," and those behaviours ran on hardware using only actuator proprioception for feedback, according to The Robot Report.

What the coverage does not say

The number that matters here is not degrees of freedom but how often an in-hand reorientation succeeds over a full shift, and neither outlet gives that figure. Humanoids Daily says no broad task-success benchmark was provided and that the company's video labels some footage as teleoperated.

No ship date, price or production volume is given. The Robot Report notes that the Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America in Georgia opened about a week earlier, as a place to train staff to integrate Atlas into Hyundai's car plants, but it does not link the hand to that site.

The backdrivability claim, that joints yield under impact and so protect the gearbox, is an engineering rationale and not a published impact-test rating, Humanoids Daily points out.

What would change my read: a success rate for trigger-tool tasks over a set number of hours, with the teleoperated runs counted separately.