Atlas gets a new hand: Boston Dynamics unveils next-generation gripper for industrial work

The humanoid robot Atlas picks up a small object with its fingers, then rotates it in its palm. It pinches items between its thumb and fingertips, and grips a tool handle while pressing a trigger with a single finger. One detail stands out: the hand has four fingers, one fewer than a human hand.

Boston Dynamics, the robotics subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Group, unveiled the GR3 on Thursday (local time) — a next-generation hand designed for Atlas. The new hand moves beyond the previous gripper's basic pick-and-place capability, with a design built for precise part manipulation and the use of a wide range of tools in industrial settings.

The new hand marks an advance over the mass-production Atlas shown at CES 2026, the world's largest consumer electronics and IT exhibition, in January. Where that model's three-finger gripper focused on stably grasping and moving objects, the GR3 features four fingers and 13 degrees of freedom (DOF), enabling significantly more precise manipulation.

Degrees of freedom refers to the number of directions in which a robot's joints can move independently. The GR3 raises that count from seven in the previous GR2 to 13. The thumb is designed to face the other fingers — as in a human hand — allowing objects to be pinched, while the remaining fingers can each splay and curl independently.

Atlas can now go beyond simply gripping objects: it can reorient items within its palm, recover a slipping object, and pull a trigger while holding a tool. "The previous hand was designed to grasp a wide variety of objects," Boston Dynamics said. "The new hand is designed to actually manipulate them."

Demonstration footage shows Atlas repeatedly repositioning objects — changing their orientation between its fingers rather than simply holding them. The robot demonstrates a pinch grip, using its thumb and one finger to pick up small, thin objects, as well as a three-finger hold that keeps an item secure while still allowing it to be moved.

The ultimate goal is to handle the tools that humans use on the factory floor. Boston Dynamics said the GR3 is designed to grip the handles of drills, electric torque drivers, grinders, nail guns and welding torches — and to operate their triggers while doing so.

Boston Dynamics built a hand that closely resembles a human one — but deliberately left out the pinky finger.

Early in development, engineers considered several configurations, including a five-finger design and one with two thumbs. To help settle the question, Jack Zekouski, Boston Dynamics' chief product and technology officer, asked members of the development team to spend a day with their pinky and ring fingers taped together.

The conclusion: a fifth finger was not worth the trade-off. Adding it would require three additional degrees of freedom, more actuators, a larger form factor, higher power consumption, greater cost and an increased risk of failure. The added dexterity, the team decided, was outweighed by the complexity it would introduce at the mass-production stage.

"A robot hand is ultimately a design that has to balance competing constraints," said Alberto Rodriguez, Boston Dynamics' director of robot behavior. "The closer you get to a human hand in terms of dexterity, the more you risk sacrificing reliability and manufacturability."

Fewer fingers, however, does not mean less capable. The GR3 is slightly larger and stronger than a human hand, and pressure sensors on the fingertips and palm detect even small shifts — such as an object beginning to slip. The fingers can also splay laterally, giving the hand a wider range of motion than a human hand in certain movements.

A particular focus was mass producibility. The actuators that drive the joints are modularized to simplify both manufacturing and maintenance. Delicate cable and tendon structures linking multiple joints have been eliminated to reduce the likelihood of failure, and individual actuator units can be swapped out when problems arise.

"What we're thinking about right now is: if we want to produce 100,000 of these hands a year, which design details do we need to change first?" Rodriguez said.

The upgrade is not only hardware. Boston Dynamics is making extensive use of a "simulation-to-real" approach — training the robot through vast numbers of movements in a virtual environment before running them on the physical machine — alongside reinforcement learning.

Footage from the development process shows engineers modeling joint positions, friction, force and contact responses in a virtual environment. The aim is to minimize the gap between the simulated hand and the physical Atlas hand, so that movements learned in simulation transfer reliably to the real robot.

Boston Dynamics designed the GR3 with direct-drive actuation, allowing the joints to sense external forces applied to the fingers. When the hand absorbs a strong impact, the joints yield rather than resist, dissipating the force and improving overall durability.

The hand upgrade is part of Boston Dynamics' broader push to commercialize industrial humanoid robots. Last month, the company opened the Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America in Georgia, where Atlas has begun training for automotive manufacturing tasks.

Atlas is currently learning logistics preparation and parts-sequencing tasks — arranging components in assembly order. Boston Dynamics plans to deploy the robot in parts-sequencing processes on a phased basis from 2028, then expand its role to parts assembly by 2030. Hyundai Motor Group aims to eventually station 25,000 Atlas units across Hyundai Motor and Kia factories worldwide.