1. Why are we interested in under-actuated tendon transmission?
Many robots, especially hands and wearable robots, have far more joints than they can afford motors. Adding an actuator for every joint makes a system heavy, bulky, and hard to control.
Under-actuated tendon transmission offers a different path: a small number of actuators pull tendons routed through the structure, and the routing itself determines how the joints move and how forces are distributed. Complexity moves from the motors and controllers into the mechanical design, so that a simple system can still produce rich, useful motions.
2. What are we working on?
We study tendon transmission as a general design method, not as part of a single robot:
- Tendon routing analysis and design – how the path, constraints, and coupling of tendons shape joint motion, motion sequence, and force distribution.
- Compact actuation – actuators and transmissions that drive multiple tendons from few motors.
- Sensing through tendons – estimating joint angles and contact forces from tendon tension, stroke, and embedded sensors.
Representative work:
- Constrained tendon routing for a soft hand-wearable robot (Exo-Glove Pinch). IEEE RA-L, 2025. Paper, Project
- Dual-Tendon Routing for under-actuated, tendon-driven soft hand-wearable robots. IEEE RA-L, 2025. Paper, Project, Video
- Modulating thumb and finger motion sequence with a single actuator (Exo-Glove Poly III). Soft Robotics, 2025. Paper, Video
- Slider-Tendon Linear Actuator with under-actuation and fast connection. IEEE/ASME T-MECH, 2021. Paper, Video
- Under-actuated robotic gripper with fiber-optic force sensing tendons. IEEE RA-L, 2024. Paper, Video
These methods are the foundation of our robotic hands projects, and we plan to combine them with computational robot co-design so that tendon routings can be designed automatically for a given task.
This page was written with the help of a large language model (LLM).