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


Leo Lin, Shivansh Patel, Jay Moon, Svetlana Lazebnik, Unnat Jain

Paper ID 192

Session Robot & Sensor Design

Poster session details TBA

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 rolling-contact joint surfaces to keep flexion on repeatable motion paths. Fifteen motors mounted off 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 vision-based teleoperation and simulation integration.