This Robot Hand Just Solved a 70 Year Problem

[00:00:03][music] [music] >> A robot can walk into a room. That part is mostly solved. The hard part is picking up a fragile object at the wrong angle without breaking it. For 70 years, the robotics industry worked around the hand problem. Instead of building human-like hands, engineers built simple two-pronged grippers. They forced factories to change their environments to suit the robots. The entire humanoid bet relies on reversing that idea. If a robot is going to work in a world built for humans, it needs human hands. The humanoids industry lives [music] or dies at the fingertips. A company called 1X just showed us what happens when you actually solve the hand problem. They unveiled the new hand for their NEO humanoid. They look organic. They are ungloved, tendon-driven, [music] and they feature 25° of freedom. That number is critical. Human hands typically have around 22 to 24 degrees of freedom, depending on how you measure them. This robot hand is actually nearing or even surpassing human-level dexterity.

[00:01:19]The engineering specs on this thing are staggering. [music] It has tactile sensing across the entire hand. It is completely sealed with an IP68 rating.

[00:01:28]That means you could drop it in a bucket of water, cover it in factory dust, or spill soup on it, and the electronics inside keep working perfectly. It hits plus or minus 0.2 mm in positioning accuracy. To put that in perspective, a human hair is about 70 micrometers thick. This robot can position its fingertips [music] with extreme sub-millimeter precision. But, the real story here is not just the mechanical design, [music] it is the manufacturing strategy.

[00:01:55]1X is building these hands in America.

[00:01:58]They explicitly state this is the most vertically integrated humanoid robot factory in the country. They do not buy off-the-shelf parts for these hands.

[00:02:07]They make the custom tendon materials in-house. They build their own 1X branded motors. They manufacture the soft polymers, the artificial skin, and the tactile sensors on site. Hundreds of these hands have already come off the assembly line. They claim they have the capacity to produce 10,000 hands just this year. [music] This breakthrough is not happening in a vacuum. Robot hands suddenly got very competitive. Tesla just showed the Optimus 5 [music] three-hand with 22 degrees of freedom, but they put the motors in the forearm and run cables down to the fingers.

[00:02:39]BrainCo built the Revo three-hand with 21 degrees of freedom, [music] focusing heavily on full palm touch sensing. A company called Wuji built a hand with 20 degrees of freedom by taking a completely different route and putting a tiny motor directly inside every single finger.

[00:02:54]Each of these companies is betting on a different mechanical philosophy. Putting motors in the fingers, like Wuji does, gives you direct control, but it adds weight to the hand and creates inertia issues when the arm swings fast. Putting motors in the forearm, like Tesla does, removes the weight from the hand, but adds complexity to the cable routing. 1X might have the edge right now because their fully tendon driven system perfectly mimics human biology.

[00:03:17]Your forearm muscles pull tendons that move your fingers. That biological design gives you incredible speed and highly precise force control.

[00:03:25]You can gently hold a raw egg or tightly grip a heavy hammer. The NEO hand does exactly that, but it achieves beyond human speed and precision. We spent the last decade obsessed with making AI brains smarter. We thought the software was the main bottleneck. The physical bottleneck was always the hardware. You can have the smartest AI model in the world running on the most powerful chips, but if the metal hand crushes the glass it tries to pick up, the AI is useless. The grip race is officially over. Humanoid native hands are here and they are going to accelerate how these machines enter our homes and workplaces.

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