Those of us who are old enough to remember the old, original Addams Family comic strip, or the original television show, or any of various movies and shows since, will remember Thing — a disembodied hand who somehow managed to be pretty expressive while scuttling around on its fingertips like some kind of strange five-legged spider. It was a funny character for a pretty funny franchise.

Now, there's a robot Thing; a mechanical, disembodied hand that scuttles around on its fingertips. The Robo-Thing (that's not what they call it; that's just what I'm calling it) is the product of a Swiss company, ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab, and they are acknowledging the similarity.

A team of researchers in Switzerland released details of a project perfect for the spooky season: a disembodied robot hand that uses its fingers to walk.

The team from ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab released videos and a pre-print paper detailing its work on the robotic hand, which they compared to Thing, the autonomous hand from The Addams Family.

Amirhossein Kazemipour, a doctoral candidate at the Soft Robotics Lab, said the robot hand's ability to walk unaided makes it unique.

"Getting a robotic hand to walk is actually pretty challenging," he said in a video released by the school. "You know, it's fingers aren't all the same, so it has to learn how to coordinate all of them while remaining balanced."

Here, check it out:

Now, they didn't just do this to be funny. Turns out that making a robot hand capable of the many various motions and interactions to allow it to scuttle about on four fingers and a thumb, all of which are of different lengths, is a considerable feat of robotics. The company has published an official paper on the Robo-Thing; here's an excerpt:

A walking robotic hand must use the same fingers to move its body, support its weight, and interact with the environment. We show how an anthropomorphic hand can learn these skills while retaining its finger design and position controller. Onboard power and computation make the platform self-contained. Our reinforcement learning approach accounts for the hand’s unequal fingers, with training in a simulator calibrated from hardware measurements. In simulation, the hand moves faster with our reward formulation than with tuned rewards originally designed for quadrupeds. On hardware, task-specific policies enable untethered crawling, steering, and fall recovery. While supporting its own weight, the hand also executes successive keyboard commands without vision and pushes an object to targets using overhead visual feedback. These results demonstrate a compact mobile manipulator that reuses its fingers for locomotion and interaction, without a separate locomotion mechanism.

Here's the thing that makes this interesting: If any company is going to build a humaniform robot, that is, an android, the hands may be the most difficult thing to work out, to have even approach the dexterity of a human hand. The human hand has 27 bones; eight carpals in the wrists, five in the palm, and fourteen in the fingers and thumb. There are 34 muscles in the human hand, including intrinsic muscles that control fine motor movements, and extrinsic muscles that originate in the forearm and control wider-ranging movements of the hands and wrists.

A human hand can form a fist and break another human's nose. That same hand can gently cradle the face of a child. A human hand can wield an axe to fell a tree, or it can wield a tiny paint brush to decorate a porcelain tea cup. That's the standards that nature has set, and these robotics engineers are taking on the challenge.

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So, what other body parts might be interesting to study? Well, the human foot is something of a marvel as well, but a foot won't be able to scurry around on its toes; too many balance and weight issues there. A jaw? We have enough to deal with as it is with people wielding their own jaws in an abrasive and annoying manner, there's no reason to aggravate that situation. An elbow or a knee? Those are a lot simpler, and we're already implanting manmade replacements for those joints, even if they aren't robotic.

Anyway, this is still an interesting development. And who knows, maybe we're one step closer to having an android servant that can split kindling and keep the wood stove going all night in the depths of an Alaska winter.