CRAFT Hand

The CRAFT Hand comes from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign together with UC Irvine and was presented at RSS 2026 after its March 2026 preprint. It is an open-source tendon hand: 15 Dynamixel XL330-M288-T servos sit behind the wrist, braided tendons run through ratcheting spools that allow re-tensioning, and passive rubber bands return the fingers.

The result is 15 active and 5 passive degrees of freedom, 20 in total, with the PIP and DIP joints coupled by a linkage. Rigid links are printed in PLA and the rolling-contact joints in soft TPU. The hand weighs 800 g and measures 198 mm, 95 mm of palm and 103 mm of finger. There are no tactile sensors; only servo position is available.

Under image-based teleoperation it performed all 33 grasp types of the Feix taxonomy, reached a pull-out force of 15.29 N and held a 5-pound dumbbell for an hour. Parts cost under 600 USD according to the paper; ROBOTIS markets a CRAFT Hand Bundle without a published price, so it is on request. The paper is CC BY 4.0, while the hardware licence is not stated.

The authors benchmark against LEAP Hand, which managed 8.67 N in the same pull-out test.