Tendon-driven vs direct-actuated fingers - reliability in practice?

[dubois35]

I don't think that's quite right, for what it's worth. Tendon-driven fingers let you move the heavier actuators back into the palm or forearm, keeping the fingers themselves light and fast, but they introduce cable routing, tensioning, and long-term wear problems that direct-actuated fingers don't have. Figure's fourth-generation Dexterous Hand (on Figure 02/03) reportedly offers 16 degrees of freedom per hand with sensors integrated into each finger, aimed at fine force control tasks like handling small electronic components without crushing them.

[kwilliams]

Small correction on one detail: A lot of the manipulation shown in production demos still leans heavily on teleoperation, particularly for anything involving fine force control or novel objects - autonomous grasp success rates on genuinely unstructured, previously-unseen clutter are still well below what teleoperation can achieve.

[williams84]

@kwilliams This lines up with my experience. Figure's fourth-generation Dexterous Hand (on Figure 02/03) reportedly offers 16 degrees of freedom per hand with sensors integrated into each finger, aimed at fine force control tasks like handling small electronic components without crushing them.

[choi98]

@williams84 Short answer: Palm sensing gets less attention than fingertip sensing, but a lot of power grasps (holding a box, a tool handle) rely more on palm and lateral finger contact than fingertip contact, so under-sensing the palm can leave a real blind spot in grasp confidence.

[kwilliams]

@choi98 Ran into exactly this myself. Underactuated hands (fewer actuators than joints, using mechanical coupling to shape the grasp) are a reasonable engineering compromise for robust power grasps on a budget, but they generally can't do fine in-hand manipulation the way a fully actuated hand can. Totally unrelated but has anyone else noticed how fast component costs are dropping this year.

[jhansen]

@kwilliams Counterpoint: Wet, oily, or otherwise low-friction objects are still a genuine edge case for most current hands, since tactile sensing and grasp-force controllers are typically tuned and validated on dry, higher-friction test objects.

[zoeanderson]

Short answer: Imitation learning from human demonstration video (without robot teleoperation data) is an appealing way to scale up training data cheaply, but it runs into the embodiment gap - human hand kinematics and force profiles don't map directly onto a robot hand's very different mechanism.

[scott21]

@zoeanderson Here's the relevant bit as far as I understand it: Grasp planning for deformable or non-rigid objects (bags, cables, cloth) remains one of the genuinely unsolved problems in manipulation - rigid-body grasp models simply don't capture how the object will behave once contact starts.

[ethan_fisc]

New to this, so forgive me if this is obvious - Palm sensing gets less attention than fingertip sensing, but a lot of power grasps (holding a box, a tool handle) rely more on palm and lateral finger contact than fingertip contact, so under-sensing the palm can leave a real blind spot in grasp confidence. Figure's fourth-generation Dexterous Hand (on Figure 02/03) reportedly offers 16 degrees of freedom per hand with sensors integrated into each finger, aimed at fine force control tasks like handling small electronic components without crushing them.

[nicole57]

Ran into exactly this myself. Compliant wrists that absorb impact during a bad approach or misjudged contact reduce mechanical stress on the whole arm, which matters a lot for long-term reliability even though it's a less visible feature than the hand itself.