These reliability issues that plague conventional robotic hands are exactly what we are solving at Tacta. Our Fluidic Tendons™ combine the precision of motor control with the power density of fluid actuation.
No overheating fingers. No cable stretching. No gearboxes degrading.
The biggest engineering mistake I made at Figure was building a tendon-based hand
Our first hand design in 2022 was a tendon hand for our F.01 robot. At a high level, the tendon approach sounds appealing, which is why I chose it: you get more space for packaging actuators since the forearm is larger, potentially higher degrees of freedom, and it's biologically inspired
We built and manufactured this entire hand and tested it in early 2023. If you saw it in person, it was truly an engineering work of art. It turned out to be one of the worst engineering decisions I've made, maybe the worst in four years. Tendons are a complete local maximum, and that only becomes clear in hindsight, after exploring every other possible hand design. Figure is unique in that we've now built and tested several hand architectures, which gave us a clear sense of where to head
Figure is working on our next generation hand, and it's so much better than anything you can do with tendons, it's not even funny