Glossary · Hardware
Tendon drive
In brief
A tendon drive transmits actuator force through cables (tendons) routed from a remote motor to the joint. This concentrates motor mass at the base while leaving the moving structure light and compact — a common design for dexterous hands.
Putting motors in a humanoid hand is hard: there is no room for them. Tendon drives solve this by mounting motors in the forearm and pulling cables that run through the wrist into the fingers. Each finger joint can be driven by an antagonistic pair of tendons (or a single tendon plus a spring return), dramatically reducing distal mass.
The Shadow Hand and many recent humanoid hand designs use tendon drives. The downsides are friction in the cable routing, tendon stretch over time, and harder-to-model joint dynamics. Direct-drive miniature actuators are an alternative but mass-intensive approach.
Related terms
See it in the wild
Browse robots and brands using these techniques
Glossary entries are upstream. The catalog is where the implementations live.