Figure Founder Admits Tendon-Driven Robot Hand Was a Major Engineering Mistake
CSProfKGD · x · 2026-08-14
Brett Adcock, founder of Figure, admits that building a tendon-driven hand for their F.01 robot in 2022 was one of his worst engineering decisions. While biologically inspired and theoretically offering better actuator packaging, the tendon approach failed in practice.
Robotics experts note that direct drives consistently outperform indirect transmissions like tendons regarding low latency, backdrivability, controllability, and real-world durability.
More from Embodied
- VLA-Δ: Zhejiang University Adds Physical State Transition Supervision to VLA Models — OmniAI-ZJU · 2026-10-16
- PINT: Shared Predictive Intent Tokens Unify Reasoning, World Modeling, and Robot Actions — Xinyu Guo · 2026-10-16
- TouchScale releases 500 hours of unified egocentric vision-tactile data for scaling study — jiqizhixin · 2026-10-16
- Ghost raises $11M for Core, a personal AI computer that runs locally in your home — nick_linck · 2026-10-16
- Robot shows up at Costco to fetch the famous $1.50 hotdog — majidmanzarpour · 2026-10-16
- 15 Leju Kuavo humanoid robots run 2 months at Hangzhou auto-parts line, 98% success rate — CyberRobooo · 2026-10-16