Human can not only support their body during standing or walking, but also support them by hand, so that they can dangle a bar and others. But most humanoid robots support their body only in the foot and they use their hand just to manipulate objects because their hands are too weak to support their body. Strong hands are supposed to enable humanoid robots to act in much broader scene. Therefore, we developed new life-size five-fingered hand that can support the body of life-size humanoid robot. It is tendon-driven and underactuated hand and actuators in forearms produce large gripping force. This hand has flexible joints using machined springs, which can be designed integrally with the attachment. Thus, it has both structural strength and impact resistance in spite of small size. As other characteristics, this hand has force sensors to measure external force and the fingers can be flexed along objects though the number of actuators to flex fingers is less than that of fingers. We installed the developed hand on musculoskeletal humanoid "Kengoro" and achieved two self-weight supporting motions: push-up motion and dangling motion.

Roboticists worldwide are spending an obscene amount of time and effort trying to teach large humanoid robots how to not fall over. We rejoice every time there is even the smallest incremental bit of progress towards success, because not falling over is super hard, especially if you want your robot to be doing something useful. And even though some large humanoid robots can occasionally survive falling over, most of them don't enjoy it very much. Led by Kei Okada and Masayuki Inaba, a team from the University of Tokyo and Kawasaki Heavy Industries is working on their own life-sized humanoid robot, and they've come up with a new strategy for not worrying about falls: not worrying about falls. Instead, they've built their robot from the ground up with an armored structure that makes it totally okay with falling over and getting right back up again. The concept behind Robust Humanoid Robot (RHP2) is, as the title of the paper suggests, that it should be able to work for a long time in hazardous situations like "a disaster site, a fire site or a wet environment."