Anatomy of the Soft Hand.
The fifth machine — and the only soft one. Four rigid bodies flew, stood, gripped and drove; this one is compliant, and that changes everything. A soft hand, taken apart three ways: the fingers that hold, the one idea that lets a single motor fit any shape, and the brain that turns out to be the smallest in the series because the body does the thinking. This is morphological computation — the body as controller — and every number on the board is computed by the Institute's open soft core, so the page cannot lie to you. Compliance is also where the guarantee gets hard: a soft, energy-storing contact is the exact regime where the energy certificate measurably breaks, and a body that computes with its own springs is the certification frontier, not a solved case.
Guess before you look.
Each opens with a question almost everyone gets wrong, a soft hand you can turn over in 3D, and the one move that makes it obvious. Open them in order, or jump to the layer you want.
How many motors?
“This soft hand has twelve joints. How many motors does it take to grip any shape?”
One. A single tendon curls the whole hand, and when it meets an object the compliant fingers wrap and conform on their own. Twelve joints, one actuator — the body supplies the other eleven degrees of freedom for free.
Open the demonstration →How does it fit every shape?
“You never tell it the shape. How does one squeeze fit a circle, a square, and a wedge?”
Morphological computation — control work done by the body's mechanics instead of a controller. The same squeeze meets each shape and the contact redistributes itself to match, evenly, with no per-shape plan. A rigid pinch makes two contacts and must plan; the soft hand makes many, and plans nothing.
Open the demonstration →How small can the brain be?
“A neural network sets the soft hand's grip. How big is its brain?”
Ninety-seven numbers — the smallest brain in the whole series. It sets one thing, how firmly to close, because the compliant body already shaped the grasp. The more the body computes, the less the brain must: that is the payoff of a soft machine.
Open the demonstration →One format, a softer machine.
The same engine that runs Flight, Balance, Grasp and Driving — the same withhold-guess-prove beats, the same editable source, the same rule that nothing is animated by hand. Only the body changed: from rigid links to a compliant one that computes with its own shape. Where the rigid hand planned a grasp, this one just closes and lets physics do the fitting — the deepest idea in the set, saved for last.
Guess first
A real question, refused an answer, until you commit. This one asks how many motors grip any shape — and the answer, one, is the surprise that opens the door to morphological computation.
It cannot lie
Every claim is checked live by the open soft core: the twelve joints moved by one input, the contact that redistributes itself across a circle, a box and a wedge, the 97-parameter brain gripping firmly on 24 of 24 sizes. Verified, not asserted.
Body as brain
One soft hand carries the whole stack — and shifts it: the compliant fingers, the morphological-computation rule that fits any shape, and the tiny learned policy that is all that is left once the body does the work. The three layers, with the body doing more of the thinking.
Start with the body →Take the course: Embodied AI Design →← All six machines