CRAFT: A Tendon-Driven Hand with Hybrid Hard-Soft Compliance

We introduce CRAFT hand, a tendon-driven anthropomorphic hand with hybrid hard-soft compliance for contact-rich manipulation. The design is based on a simple idea: contact is not uniform across the hand. Impacts concentrate at joints, while links carry most of the load. CRAFT places soft material at joints and keeps links rigid, and uses rollingcontact joint surfaces to keep flexion on repeatable motion paths. Fifteen motors mounted on the fingers drive the hand through tendons, keeping the form factor compact and the fingers light. In structural tests, CRAFT improves strength and endurance while maintaining comparable repeatability. In teleoperation, CRAFT improves handling of fragile and low-friction items, and the hand covers 33/33 grasps in the Feix taxonomy. The full design costs under $600 and will be released open-source with visionbased teleoperation and simulation integration. Project page: http://craft-hand.github.io/

Accelerating Audio Research with Robotic Dummy Heads

This work introduces a robotic dummy head that fuses the acoustic realism of conventional audiological mannequins with the mobility of robots. The proposed device is capable of moving, talking, and listening as people do, and can be used to automate spatially-stationary audio experiments, thus accelerating the pace of audio research. Critically, the device may also be used as a moving sound source in dynamic experiments, due to its quiet motor. This feature differentiates our work from previous robotic acoustic research platforms. Validation that the robot enables high quality audio data collection is provided through various experiments and acoustic measurements. These experiments also demonstrate how the robot might be used to study adaptive binaural beamforming. Design files are provided as open-source to stimulate novel audio research.