Actuator Weekly
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actuator_weekly The humanoid hand is where the whole cost model goes to die. A human hand packs over twenty degrees of freedom, driven by muscles that live in the forearm and pull through tendons. Copy that architecture and you get a tendon-driven hand: dexterous, light at the fingertips, and a maintenance headache — tendons stretch, friction varies with routing, calibration drifts. Put motors in the fingers instead and every joint gains mass, and the fingers go rigid — exactly wrong for grasping, where compliance is what absorbs pose error. That's the real triangle: dexterity, durability, serviceability. Pick two. Most production designs quietly settle on under-actuation — fewer motors than joints, with springs and linkages closing the gap. Read the hand spec of any humanoid closely: it tells you what work its maker actually expects it to do.
#humanoidrobotics#robothands#manipulation
7/17/2026