Building a Cheap, Dexterous Robot Hand

What happened

Building a Cheap, Dexterous Robot Hand, according to Hackaday. Such performance has thus far eluded robot hands, but fortunately few tasks require it; the main challenge is dexterity, which is where [Vittorio Lumare]’s low-cost Yeah Hand could help. The Yeah Hand is mostly 3D-printed and operates with five servo motors per hand; like a human hand, it has no actuators within the fingers themselves, instead using fishing-line tendons to transfer motion from the motors.

To reduce friction and keep the motors from overheating, each tendon runs through guides made from PTFE Bowden tubes; in tests, the hand ran 800 cycles of opening and closing without even getting close to overheating. The hand can lift up to eight kilograms and apply a maximum grasping force of five kg. For better grip, each finger has silicone grips along the inner surface, which let it hold smooth objects quite steady; to pick up fine objects, the thumbs have thumbnails.