Institute for Physical AI @ BMI · a demonstration
A soft hand, taken apart three ways: the compliant fingers that grip, the one idea that lets them hold anything, and the brain that turns out to be smaller because of it. This is the body — drag to turn it over, then watch it close. You are picturing a motor at every joint; the truth is that the body does most of the work itself, for free. The source on the right runs the real soft-finger model, so it cannot lie to you.
Provenance. Each finger is a constant-curvature soft actuator — the standard continuum model: one tendon sets a uniform bend along all its joints, and where the finger meets an object it is projected onto the surface, so it wraps. Twelve joints move from a single input because the compliance supplies the rest — this is morphological computation, the body doing control the brain would otherwise have to. Every contact on the board is computed by the open soft core, not animated. The 3D model is illustrative; the numbers are exact.