Dexterous robot manipulation
The ability of a robot hand to grasp, reposition, and precisely control objects — the last unsolved bottleneck between a robot that can walk and one that can actually do useful work.
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Dexterous manipulation is what happens after a robot reaches an object: grasping it without crushing or dropping it, reorienting it in-hand, and applying just enough force for the task. Human hands solve this with 27 bones, dozens of muscles, and dense tactile sensing built up over years of practice. Robot hands have none of that history. The hard part is contact: small errors in force or position compound into drops. Learned policies trained on teleoperated demonstrations or simulation have recently narrowed the gap, but reliable in-hand control in unstructured settings remains an open problem.
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NEO's Hands
1X's new humanoid hand runs its tendons at a tenth the usual gear ratio, so every joint is soft enough to feel what it touches — and dexterous enough to sort grapes and thread a screwdriver.
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