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.
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