Skip to content
Bud's Wiki

Yeah Hand — a mostly-3D-printed anthropomorphic hand with tendon drive, ROS, and a prosthetic variant

TL;DR

Section titled “TL;DR”

A tweet highlighting Yeah Hand, by Italian engineer Vittorio Lumare — a mostly-3D-printed five-servo anthropomorphic hand with fishing-line tendons routed through PTFE guides and motors mounted in the forearm. Advertised specs: 8 kg lift, ~5 kg power-grip force, 800 open-close cycles without overheating, silicone finger pads, and ships in two variants (a robotics version with ROS and arm-mount flanges, and an experimental prosthetic for research). On Tindie in beta at ~217forakitand 217 for a kit and ~581 assembled, with a flex-sensor glove for teleop. Positioned as a counter to lab/corporate paywalls around dexterous hands.

Key claims

Section titled “Key claims”
  • Mostly 3D-printed construction with 5 servos per hand, fishing-line tendons routed through PTFE guides, motors mounted in the forearm (not fingers) [tweet].
  • Tested through 800 open-close cycles without overheating [tweet].
  • Payload: 8 kg lift and ~5 kg power-grip force [tweet].
  • Two product variants: robotics (ROS + arm-mount flanges) and experimental prosthetic for research [tweet].
  • Pricing on Tindie beta: kits from ~217,assembled 217, assembled ~581 [tweet].
  • Flex-sensor glove ships as the mirror-teleop input device [tweet].

Method

Section titled “Method”

Tweet-level description only. The design is tendon-driven with motors in the forearm (biomimetic routing, like a human hand), using fishing line as the tendon medium and PTFE for low-friction guides. Five servos per hand means each servo likely drives one finger via a single tendon, so the hand is severely underactuated (no independent joint control within a finger). Teleoperation is mirror-mode from a flex-sensor glove reading the operator’s finger flexion.

Results

Section titled “Results”

Vendor-stated bench numbers only, no third-party evaluation:

  • 800-cycle open/close reliability without close-to-overheating thresholds crossed.
  • 8 kg lift capacity.
  • ~5 kg power-grip force.
  • Silicone pads for smooth-object manipulation, small thumbnails for fine picks.
  • Tindie beta pricing: 217(kit)/217 (kit) / 581 (assembled).

Why it’s interesting

Section titled “Why it’s interesting”

Slots at the extreme-cheap / low-DoF end of the open-hand-hardware axis the wiki has been tracking: ORCA: An Open-Source, Reliable, Cost-Effective, Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand for Uninterrupted Dexterous Task Learning (17-DoF, <2,000 CHF, dedicated fingertip tactile) and Aero Hand Open: low-cost, open-source, lightweight, anthropomorphic dexterous hand (16 joints / 7 motors, 314BOM,tendon−forcesensing)bothsitaboveit;YeahHanddropsto5servos/fishing−linetendonsat 314 BOM, tendon-force sensing) both sit above it; Yeah Hand drops to 5 servos / fishing-line tendons at ~217 and adds the prosthetic sibling as a product-line variant. The tweet-level claims (800 cycles, 8 kg lift) are a full order of magnitude below ORCA / Aero Hand’s reliability tests (ORCA has ran autonomous pick-and-place for 7h17min; Aero Hand did 1M cycles over 5×24h), so the “research-grade” framing is relative to hobbyist baselines rather than lab-grade substrates. The flex-sensor glove + fishing-line tendons combination is the pragmatic-maker descendant of the lineage that mimic (Solving Dexterity: A Full-Stack Approach (mimic hand M1 + wearable U1)) and TwinDEX (TwinDEX: A Scalable Path from Robot-Free Data Collection to Real-World Dexterous Manipulation) push into vertically-integrated commercial stacks.

See also

Section titled “See also”