1X Gives Its Neo Robot a 25-DOF Hand: Lifts a Kettlebell, Picks a Grape

Humanoid robots have been stuck for decades — often not on the legs, but on the hands.

Three key facts

On July 9, humanoid robotics company 1X unveiled a tendon-driven hand for its Neo robot, with 25 degrees of freedom per hand — 22 in the fingers and palm, 3 at the wrist. For comparison, a human hand has about 27. The hand carries tactile sensing that measures normal force, contact location, and shear, is IP68 waterproof, uses food-safe materials, hits 3.5 newton-meters of peak torque at the thumb, and positions to ±0.2 millimeters.

In demos it lifts a roughly 9-kilogram (20-pound) kettlebell, yet can pluck a grape off its stem, screw in a lightbulb, and pick a single screw off the floor. 1X says the entire hand — tendons, motors, polymers, tactile sensors — is designed and built in-house, with capacity for 10,000 hands this year.

The hand ships on every Neo. Neo targets the home, with early-access pricing at $20,000. Founder and CEO Bernt Børnich said the goal was never "a hand that just looks impressive on paper," but one that matches or surpasses human capability on every dimension that matters.

WangDou's Take

The engineering here is real: 25 degrees of freedom closing in on the human hand's 27, picking grapes and hoisting kettlebells — the spec sheet dazzles. But if there's one thing this industry excels at, it's shooting a jaw-dropping short clip. The real hurdle isn't "pick one grape under studio lights," it's "do it a thousand times in a stranger's messy kitchen without dropping a plate or crushing the fruit" — and those two live orders of magnitude apart. Do the math: $20,000 a unit is the price of a car; 10,000 hands a year, two per robot, is 5,000 robots — not enough to cover one small town's house-cleaning demand. Building the hardware first is fine, but the gap from "can perform" to "can be used" is reliability, not dexterity. That number, too, went unmentioned at the reveal.

Source: Forbes · The AI Insider · NewsBang