CRAFT: A Tendon-Driven Hand with Hybrid Hard-Soft Compliance

[Submitted on 12 Mar 2026 (v1), last revised 23 Jun 2026 (this version, v2)]

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Abstract:We introduce CRAFT hand, a tendon-driven anthropomorphic hand with hybrid hard-soft compliance for contact-rich manipulation. The design is based on a simple idea: contact is not uniform across the hand. Impacts concentrate at joints, while links carry most of the load. CRAFT places soft material at joints and keeps links rigid, and uses rollingcontact joint surfaces to keep flexion on repeatable motion paths. Fifteen motors mounted on the fingers drive the hand through tendons, keeping the form factor compact and the fingers light. In structural tests, CRAFT improves strength and endurance while maintaining comparable repeatability. In teleoperation, CRAFT improves handling of fragile and low-friction items, and the hand covers 33/33 grasps in the Feix taxonomy. The full design costs under $600 and will be released open-source with visionbased teleoperation and simulation integration. Project page: this http URL

Submission history

From: Leo Lin [view email]
[v1] Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:23:19 UTC (11,443 KB)
[v2] Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:40:39 UTC (11,443 KB)