ETH Zurich turns an off-the-shelf robot hand into a robot that walks on its fingertips

IEEE Spectrum reported on 8 October 2026 that researchers at ETH Zurich have turned an off-the-shelf robotic hand into a self-contained robot that walks on its fingertips while using the same fingers to manipulate its environment. Project lead Amirhossein Kazemipour, a PhD candidate in ETH's Soft Robotics Lab, says it could handle fiddly industrial maintenance tasks, or in search and rescue a robot could detach its hand to explore spaces too tight for the rest of its body. Robotics & Automation News separately reported that the hand comes from developer WUJI and can crawl and recover from falls.

What it means Body parts that can do more than one job point to simpler, cheaper robots for confined or awkward spaces.