Cable routing through the wrist - how do commercial hands avoid tangling over time?

End effectors, dexterous hands, tendon drives, tactile fingertips, grasp planning, and teleoperation.
rao91
Posts: 100
Joined: Thu Jul 31, 2025 1:55 am

Re: Cable routing through the wrist - how do commercial hands avoid tangling over time?

Post by rao91 »

@karen.chen3 I can speak to this a bit. Vision-based grasp confidence estimation (predicting success before attempting a grasp) and tactile-based confirmation (confirming after contact) are complementary rather than competing - vision helps you choose a grasp, tactile tells you if it actually worked. 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.
he/him
chloe_jack
Posts: 176
Joined: Sat Nov 30, 2024 12:42 pm

Re: Cable routing through the wrist - how do commercial hands avoid tangling over time?

Post by chloe_jack »

Speaking from personal experience here, Cable routing through a wrist joint with multiple degrees of freedom is a genuinely tricky mechanical design problem - tendons and wiring both need enough slack to avoid binding through the full range of motion without tangling or fraying over thousands of cycles.
"The best actuator is the one that doesn't overheat."
dchen
Posts: 182
Joined: Wed Nov 13, 2024 6:51 am

Re: Cable routing through the wrist - how do commercial hands avoid tangling over time?

Post by dchen »

@chloe_jack I don't think that's quite right, for what it's worth. 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.
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