Adcock calls Figure's first tendon-driven hand a mistake
Figure's CEO says the company copied the human forearm, then backed out of it.
Figure's first-generation robot hand was tendon-driven, meaning most of the motors sit in the forearm and thin cables pull the fingers, the way human anatomy works. Brett Adcock now says that was a mistake. In a clip posted by @sourceryy, he says the design "ended up becoming the wrong engineering choice."
What replaced it is the high degree-of-freedom next-generation hand that Adcock says Figure unveiled a month before that clip. He describes it as having human-level dexterity and as many joints in the hand as a human hand. Separately, Adcock posted that he is bullish on embracing the complexity and building really capable human-like hands, with a one-line verdict on the new hardware. "F.04 hands are 馃グ"
F.04 hands are 馃グ
Why hands, specifically
Adcock frames the hand as the whole ballgame rather than one subsystem. His words in the clip are that this is extremely important, and that if we want to solve AGI and get to human intelligence in the physical world, it is all going to start with the hands. That is a strong claim to hang on a single component, and it explains why Figure was willing to throw out a generation of hardware rather than iterate on it.
The interesting part is what the reversal says about copying biology. The tendon layout was chosen because it mirrors the human forearm. Adcock's rationale in the clip is exactly that, most of our motors are in our forearm and little tendons drive all the fingers. Then the thing that made it a good biological argument did not make it a good engineering one. He does not say in these sources what specifically went wrong.
Shown versus claimed
This is Adcock talking about hands, not footage of hands doing work. Nobody outside Figure has seen the human-level dexterity claim tested on a task, and these sources include no success rates, no joint count beyond the comparison to a human hand, and no demo. Figure has been public about hardware turnover before, including the molten steel send-off it gave its retiring F.02 robots.
It ended up becoming the wrong engineering choice.
This hand has human-level dexterity, as many joints in the hand as a human.