Neo's amazing new hands - just released!

[00:00:00]I am so massively pumped. 1X just revealed Neals new hands and they are freaking amazing. I saw these first a couple of weeks ago. I was interviewing Dar Sleeper who's ahead of product design at 1X and he showed me some video which was incredible, kind of mind-blowing. I could report that but I couldn't record it and I couldn't give you the details. Today, literally 20 minutes ago, they released them and they're super impressive. Okay, 25 degrees of freedom, they're tendon driven. They're claiming near human level dexterity and they're showing it.

[00:00:40]Strength and reliability as well. It's really, really, really good.

[00:00:47]There's so many cool things to talk about here and I'll show you all the video I have on them as I'm talking about them. Most hands are kind of right only. You tell the hand to go to a position, it goes there.

[00:01:01]No data comes back. It doesn't actually feel anything like you or I humans feel anything. The gearing's pretty aggressive. It's 100 or 1200 to 1. That eats up any contact forces. The motor doesn't sense anything. The hand is pretty numb.

[00:01:18]Neals hand runs at much lower gear ratios. 5 to 1, 15 to 1 using tendons.

[00:01:25]They pull the fingers. Every single joint is both a motor and a sensor. Push on a finger and it gives or is back drivability. Tells you exactly how hard it pushed. That's force transparency in 1X speak. The force flows out, information flows back and the robot knows what's going on. That's how it can handle something that's maybe unfamiliar and how you do it and how I do it. We we touch it, we feel it, we're we're asking questions with our fingers. How hard is this thing? How heavy is this thing?

[00:01:59]What texture is this thing? And Neo can do some of that as well.

[00:02:03]So, Neo can assemble LEGO. It can pick up individual screws. Can you believe that? Can pick out coins out of a wallet. It can install a light bulb. It can use a screwdriver. Can rotate an object. Zip up or down a jacket. So, maybe it can dress itself. I talked to Dar Sleeper about that when I interviewed him a couple weeks ago. He said, "Yeah, you don't want to have to dress your robot. It's the butler, not you."

[00:02:28]It can sort grapes, pick them off the stem. That's great. Pour tea. Can catch a a ball, a squishy ball. Plug in a USB-C charger. It also charge itself.

[00:02:39]Connect its own cord, which is great.

[00:02:42]They're also pretty strong. It's not weak. They're showing it lifting a 20-lb weight. That's impressive.

[00:02:50]The wrist puts out almost 18 Newton meters of torque. So, it can open doors, push loaded carts, lift, carry stuff, and also do the more delicate things.

[00:03:00]Positioning accuracy about 2/10 of a millimeter. So, that's really, really good.

[00:03:05]And it's not just about a claw or hard fingers. There's a skin layer.

[00:03:12]And that's doing some real work. There's high-resolution tactile sensing across the fingertips, measuring pressure, where the contact is, shear forces, if something's about to slip out. All that stuff. So, it can regrip when something's sliding out. That's huge.

[00:03:30]Guess what? These hands are washable.

[00:03:33]They're what Neo can wash its own hands.

[00:03:36]This is huge. If you want Neo to make you a fried egg.

[00:03:43]Um if you want Neo to help you prep for dinner by cutting up all the tomatoes and carrots and whatever else you might be putting in a salad or something like that. Neo can wash its hands afterwards.

[00:03:56]That's huge. What robot do you know today that can wash its own hands?

[00:04:03]They're food safe. It's impressive. 1X says that they've run through millions of test cycles with these things and the wrist joints are proven past 2 million cycles under load, sealed to IP68.

[00:04:17]So, just like your iPhone or your Android phone, um you can dunk it underwater and it should be okay.

[00:04:26]That is really, really cool.

[00:04:29]Um I'm super pumped. Hands are what make a robot useful, especially humanoid robot. They make the point in their blog post that they just wrote, you know, the legs are for getting it somewhere, the body is for, you know, having a battery and power source and and and all the having compute and all that other stuff. Hands are what do the actual work. Hands are what enable it to be something that can do all your chores around the house, that can uh do what you want it to do, fold your clothes, put away the laundry, do the laundry, vacuum the house, whatever it might be. Hands do it. That's really, really cool. In fact, when I talked to Dar Sleeper about this just 3 weeks ago or so, he said, "It's going to ship with more hardware capability than the AI knows how to use." So, you're going to be able to update this thing with over-the-air software updates regularly and repeatedly and your Neo will just get smarter and smarter.

[00:05:33]One thing I saw, initially I saw amazing speed in the video that Dar showed me. I didn't see that today in a lot of the demo videos that 1X sent over, uh but I assume that that's coming as well, perhaps in future future iterations. Anyways, super exciting. Uh, having great hands is essential for having a great humanoid robot that can do good work in your space, whether that's at home, whether that's in a more industrial setting, logistics, warehouse setting, wherever it might be. And of course, Neos intended more for the home right now.

[00:06:14]Um, I'm I'm super pumped by this. I know there's so many great hands that are out there and in development, and I'm excited about that because we need great hands to have great robots. They need to be washable, they need to be cleanable, they need to be strong, they need to be flexible, they need to have all the capability pretty much that we do.

[00:06:36]That's maybe an impossible task, um, but I think we're starting to get pretty close.