This is my pretty instant first look at 1X’s just-unveiled NEO robot hands. Hot take: they’re a massive leap toward truly useful humanoid robots.
With 25 degrees of freedom, tendon-driven actuation, tactile sensing, force feedback, and near-human dexterity, these hands can do far more than simple gripping. They can assemble LEGO, pick up tiny screws and coins, plug in a USB-C cable, zip jackets, use tools, sort delicate fruit, and even wash themselves.
(Washable robot hands! That’s not common.)
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In this video, I break down what makes these hands fundamentally different from traditional robotic grippers, why backdrivability and force transparency matter, and why hands may be the single most important component of practical humanoid robots.
Topics covered:
- Why most robot hands are still “numb”
- How tendon-driven hands improve dexterity
- Force sensing and tactile feedback explained
- Precision handling of tiny objects
- Strength, durability, and IP68 sealing
- Why washable robot hands matter for home robotics
- Over-the-air upgrades and the future of NEO
If humanoid robots are going to become useful assistants in homes, warehouses, and workplaces, breakthroughs like this are what will make it possible.
Transcript: Neo’s amazing new hands
I am so massively pumped. 1X just revealed Neo’s new hands, and they are freaking amazing. I saw these first a couple of weeks ago. I was interviewing Dar Sleeper, who’s the head of product design at 1X, and he showed me some video, which was incredible, kind of mind-blowing. I could report on 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. Strength and reliability as well. It’s really, really, really good. There are so many cool things to talk about here, and I’ll show you all the video I have of them as I’m talking about them.
Most hands are position-only. You tell the hand to go to a position, and it goes there. No data comes back. It doesn’t actually feel anything like you or I do. The gearing is pretty aggressive—100- or 1,200-to-one. That eats up any contact forces. The motor doesn’t sense anything. The hand is pretty numb.
Neo’s hand runs at much lower gear ratios, five to one and fifteen to one. Using tendons, they pull the fingers. Every single joint is both a motor and a sensor. Push on a finger, and it gives. There’s back-drivability, and it tells you exactly how hard it pushed. That’s force transparency in 1X’s terminology. The force flows out, information flows back, and the robot knows what’s going on. That’s how it can handle something that’s unfamiliar, the same way you and I do.
We touch things. We feel them. We’re asking questions with our fingers. How hard is this thing? How heavy is this thing? What texture is this thing? Neo can do some of that as well. Neo can assemble LEGO. It can pick up individual screws. Can you believe that? It can pick up coins out of a wallet.
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It can install a light bulb. It can use a screwdriver. It 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 of weeks ago, and he said, “Yeah, you don’t want to have to dress your robot. It’s the butler, not you.”
It can sort grapes and pick them off the stem. That’s great. It can pour tea. It can catch a squishy ball, plug in a USB-C charger, and even charge itself by connecting its own cord, which is great.
They’re also pretty strong. It’s not weak. They’re showing it lifting a 20-pound weight. That’s impressive. The wrist puts out almost 18 newton-meters of torque, so it can open doors, push loaded carts, lift and carry stuff, and also do the more delicate things. Positioning accuracy is about two-tenths of a millimeter, so that’s really, really good.
It’s not just about a claw or hard fingers. There’s a skin layer, and that’s doing some real work. There’s high-resolution tactile sensing across the fingertips, measuring pressure, where the contact is, and shear forces if something is about to slip. It can re-grip when something is sliding out. That’s huge.
Guess what? These hands are washable. Neo can wash its own hands. This is huge. If you want Neo to make you a fried egg, or 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, Neo can wash its hands afterward. That’s huge.
What robot do you know today that can wash its own hands? 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 two million cycles under load. They’re sealed to IP68. Just like your iPhone or your Android phone, you can dunk it underwater, and it should be okay.
That is really, really cool. I’m super pumped. Hands are what make a robot useful, especially a humanoid robot. They make the point in their blog post that the legs are for getting it somewhere. The body is for having a battery, a power source, compute, and everything else.
Hands are what do the actual work. Hands are what enable it to do all your chores around the house, do what you want it to do, fold your clothes, put away the laundry, do the laundry, vacuum the house, or whatever it might be. Hands do it. That’s really, really cool.
In fact, when I talked to Dar Sleeper about this three 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.
One thing I saw initially was 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, but I assume that’s coming as well, perhaps in future iterations.
Anyway, super exciting. Having great hands is essential for having a great humanoid robot that can do good work in your space, whether that’s at home or in a more industrial, logistics, or warehouse setting. Of course, Neo is intended more for the home right now.
I’m super pumped by this. I know there are so many great hands 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 pretty much all the capability that we do.
That’s maybe an impossible task, but I think we’re starting to get pretty close.