Duke's Cartesian Hand manipulates with seven prismatic joints and zero rotation
lukas_m_ziegler · x · 2026-09-24
Duke's General Robotics Lab unveiled the Cartesian Hand, where all seven joints are prismatic—pure linear motion with no rotary articulation. Two independently actuated parallel grippers hold different parts of an object while four translating fingertips generate relative motion (e.g., gripping a bottle while twisting its cap). Because each fingertip position is a fixed linear function of the joints, the Jacobian is a constant full-rank matrix: no singularities anywhere in the workspace, and manipulation composes out of linear primitives that behave identically everywhere—a notable contrast to conventional articulated hands with configuration-dependent Jacobians.
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