Figure's Founder Admits Tendon-Driven Hands Were a Major Engineering Mistake
adcock_brett · x · 2026-08-13
Figure founder Brett Adcock revealed that the tendon-driven hand designed in 2022 for their F.01 robot was one of his worst engineering decisions. While the biologically inspired approach offered packaging advantages and high degrees of freedom, testing proved it to be a local maximum that hindered progress.
After exploring multiple architectures, Figure recently unveiled a next-generation, human-level dexterous hand with high degrees of freedom, aiming to master physical world tasks and advance toward embodied AGI.
More from Embodied
- Tesla Unveils 'Flying Roadster' Reportedly Equipped with Cold Gas Thrusters — nptacek · 2026-10-16
- AutoAgent0: VLM-powered agentic runtime lifts long-tail driving success by 28.3pp — yining_hong · 2026-10-16
- CarryOn: dual-loop harness adds personalization and safe recovery to frozen VLA robots — Zixuan Wang · 2026-10-16
- FoveaVLA replaces wrist cameras with learned foveation, hitting 70.8% success — Haoyu_Xiong_ · 2026-10-16
- Musk teases two-way Grok x Optimus integration: Grok in the bot, bot in Grok — beffjezos · 2026-10-16
- SimVTA uses simulator-rendered video to post-train driving world action models with RL — OpenDriveLab · 2026-10-16