ORCA: Open-Source, Reliable, Cost-Effective, Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand

A 17-DOF, open-source, tendon-driven anthropomorphic dexterous hand from ETH Zurich.

ORCA is an open-source anthropomorphic dexterous hand from ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab, with its paper posted in April 2025 and later published at IROS 2025. It has 17 degrees of freedom (16 in the fingers, 1 in the wrist), uses tendon drive (motors sit outside the hand and pull the fingers via cables, like tendons), and integrates tactile sensors; its parts can be 3D-printed or bought off the shelf, with material costs under CHF 2,000 and an assembly time of under 8 hours. Its design includes joints that can dislocate and reset without damage, automatic calibration, and automatic tendon tensioning, and in testing it ran continuously for more than 10,000 cycles (about 20 hours) with no hardware failure. In June 2026, the team published a follow-up platform paper connecting low-level control, simulation, teleoperation from consumer devices, and hand motion retargeting, and integrating it with the LeRobot training pipeline.

ExampleA researcher can 3D-print and assemble their own ORCA hand using the STL files and assembly video on the project's website, then teleoperate it with a VR headset to collect data and train a dexterous-manipulation policy.

Also called

ORCA, ORCA Hand

Related

Dexterous Hand · Tendon-Driven Actuation · LEAP Hand · Tactile Sensor · Open-Source Hardware (OSHW) · LeRobot

Sources

The ORCA Hand - Soft Robotics Lab, ETH Zurich
arXiv 2504.04259 ORCA: An Open-Source, Reliable, Cost-Effective, Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand
arXiv 2606.14561 ORCA: A Platform for Open-Source Dexterity Research

As of

2026-06