Robotic Hand Design

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Overview

Robotic hand design asks how a hand’s shape, joints, actuators, materials, and sensors determine what it can grasp and manipulate. Common approaches include tendon-driven and underactuated fingers, linkage mechanisms, compliant soft-rigid structures, and remote actuation; designs increasingly integrate tactile sensing and are co-optimized with control or learning methods. Researchers assess hands through grasp taxonomies, object-manipulation tasks, teleoperation, and emerging standardized dexterity benchmarks. A central tension is whether anthropomorphic complexity is worth its cost: human-like motion can help in some tasks, but task-specific mechanisms may be simpler, while robust performance and fair comparisons remain challenging.

Latest papers

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70 papers6 papers in the last four weeks, down 57% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. CRAFT: A Tendon-Driven Hand with Hybrid Hard-Soft Compliance

    Mar 12, 2026Leo Lin, Shivansh Patel, Jay Moon +2Robotic Hand DesignRobotic Grasping

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · UC Irvine

  2. Learning Bimanual Cloth Manipulation with Vision-based Tactile Sensing via Single Robotic Arm

    Mar 11, 2026Dongmyoung Lee, Wei Chen, Xiaoshuai Chen +2Deformable Object ManipulationBimanual Robotic Manipulation

    Robot Intelligence Lab, Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London, 25 Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2DB, UK

  3. Soft Rigid Hybrid Gripper with Inflatable Silicone Pockets for Tunable Frictional Grasping

    Mar 7, 2026Hoang Hiep Ly, Cong-Nhat Nguyen, Doan-Quang Tran +6Robotic GraspingRobotic Hand Design

  4. A Novel Reconfigurable Dexterous Hand Based on Triple-Symmetric Bricard Parallel Mechanism

    Mar 1, 2026Chunxu Tian, Zhichao Huang, Hongzeng Li +4Robotic Hand DesignRobotic Grasping

    Institute of AI and Robotics, Academy for Engineering & Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China. · Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong.

  5. DigiArm: An Anthropomorphic 3D-Printed Prosthetic Hand with Enhanced Dexterity for Typing Tasks

    Feb 26, 2026Dean Zadok, Tom Naamani, Yuval Bar-Ratson +5Robotic Hand DesignAssistive Robotics

    Department of Computer Science, Technion, Haifa, Israel · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technion, Haifa, Israel

  6. FruitTouch: A Perceptive Gripper for Gentle and Scalable Fruit Harvesting

    Feb 22, 2026Ruohan Zhang, Mohammad Amin Mirzaee, Wenzhen YuanRobotic GraspingRobotic Hand Design

    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA

  7. House of Dextra: Cross-embodied Co-design for Dexterous Hands

    Dec 3, 2025Kehlani Fay, Darin Anthony Djapri, Anya Zorin +6Robotic Hand DesignDexterous Manipulation

    University of California, San Diego · University of California, Santa Barbara

  8. MILE: A Mechanically Isomorphic Hand Exoskeleton and Visuotactile Robotic Hand for Data Collection in Dexterous Manipulation

    Nov 29, 2025Jinda Du, Jieji Ren, Qiaojun Yu +6Robotic Hand DesignDexterous Manipulation

    State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China. · Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China. · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai, China. +1

  9. Do Robots Really Need Anthropomorphic Hands? A Comparison of Human and Robotic Hands

    Aug 7, 2025Alexander Fabisch, Wadhah Zai El Amri, Chandandeep Singh +1Robotic Hand DesignDexterous Manipulation

    Robotics Innovation Center, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI), Robert-Hooke-Straße 1, Bremen, 28359, Bremen, Germany. · Leibniz Universität Hannover, L3S Research Center, Appelstraße, Hanover, 30167, Lower Saxony, Germany.

  10. Development of a Low-Cost Prosthetic Hand Using Electromyography and Machine Learning

    Nov 23, 2024Mosab Diab, Ashraf Mohammed, Yinlai JiangAssistive RoboticsRobotic Hand Design

    Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Khartoum, Khartoum, Sudan · Center for Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, The University of Electro-Communications, Chofu, Tokyo, Japan