A Helping Hand Zhengyang (Kris) Weng (MSR '25) brought a passion for the piano to MSR, where his independent project replicating a human hand could ultimately impact robots in hospital operating rooms ...

A program autonomously switches between off, low, medium, and high pressures allowing the robot hand to complete the first level of the video game in fewer than 90 seconds.

Before this advancement, programming a robot to perform even a simple aspect of a surgery required hand-coding every step. Someone might spend a decade trying to model suturing, Krieger said.