ORCA Dexterity announces three new open source robotic hands

TL;DR

Announcement video from ORCA Dexterity (the ETH Zurich Soft Robotics Lab spinout behind the ORCA hand, arXiv:2504.04259) unveiling three open-source, 3D-printable tendon-driven anthropomorphic hands for manipulation research: orcahand lite (9-DoF adaptive, from $1,500), `orcahand` (17-DoF,$ 3,500), and orcahand touch (17-DoF + 351 taxels × 5 digits with 3D force vectors, from $6,100). All three share the same open firmware (orca_core), are field-repairable, and mount to the ISO 9409-1 standard. Video itself has no transcript; details reconstructed from the ORCA project page and third-party coverage.

Key claims

Three-tier product line from a single tendon-driven platform: 9-DoF lite (from $1,500), 17-DoF standard (from$ 3,500), and 17-DoF touch with per-finger tactile arrays (from $6,100); fully-loaded bimanual pair reaches ~$ 17,900 [video description].
The touch variant integrates 351 taxels per hand, each outputting a full 3D force vector (shear + slip + normal) at 0.1 N sensitivity and 1 mm spatial resolution [description].
All three hands share firmware (orca_core on GitHub), mount to ISO 9409-1, and are designed to be field-repairable and 3D-printable end-to-end [description].
Underlying platform is the ETH Zurich ORCA v1: 17-DoF tendon-driven anthropomorphic hand, integrated tactile sensors, one-person assembly in <8 hours, material cost below 2,000 CHF ([arXiv:2504.04259 abstract]).

Method

The ORCA design is tendon-driven with popping joints, auto-calibration, and integrated tensioning. The touch tier extends this with a whole-hand taxel array (351 taxels × 3D force per digit), delivered as an open hardware package: 3D-print files, BoM, firmware, and control code released together. The lite 9-DoF variant swaps the finger kinematics for an adaptive underactuated design to hit the $1,500 price floor while keeping the same software interface and mounting standard as the higher tiers.

Results

Video is an announcement only — no benchmark numbers are shown. The underlying ORCA v1 hand has separately been evaluated on a 7 h 17 min continuous pick-and-place run under an imitation-learned policy [srl.ethz.ch/orcahand.html] and across teleoperation / imitation-learning / zero-shot sim-to-real RL tasks in the arxiv paper [arXiv:2504.04259 §I]. The new three-tier lineup extends the same platform to a lower price floor ($1,500 lite) and a richer contact-sensing tier (351-taxel touch).

Why it’s interesting

Directly extends the sensor-placement-dominates-type finding from Tactile Genesis: Exploring Tactile Sensors at Scale for Learning Dexterous Tasks into commercially procurable hardware: the touch tier commits to whole-hand tactile coverage rather than fingertip-only, at a price point that undercuts commercial dexterous hands by an order of magnitude. Complements the open-hardware direction of Aero Hand Open: low-cost, open-source, lightweight, anthropomorphic dexterous hand (Aero Hand Open at $314, no tactile) and Solving Dexterity: A Full-Stack Approach (mimic hand M1 + wearable U1) (mimic M1 with motor-current implicit force sensing) on the same open-anthropomorphic-hand axis — three distinct bets on which sensing modality is load-bearing (whole-hand taxel arrays vs no tactile vs joint-torque implicit force). Puts a hardware substrate under the Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton: Learning Compliant Whole-body Policies with Real-time Torque Feedback and Getting a Grip on Robotic Data Collection — Co-Designed Koala Gripper for Force-Mediated Manipulation “force-in-the-collection-loop” recipes.