Hands That Feel Every Touch and Move in a Blur Give 1X’s NEO Humanoid a Real Shot at Useful Work

Engineers at 1X put the motors for the new NEO hands up in the forearm. Strong cables run down through the wrist and pull on the fingers and palm. This tendon-driven layout keeps the hand itself light while delivering strong, precise pulls. Low gear ratios between 5-to-1 and 15-to-1 let the system stay backdrivable. Push on any finger and it yields while reporting the exact force it encountered.

This design tweak allows the hand to engage with the environment in a much more natural manner. Robot hands typically use high gear ratios, which make them stiff and entirely numb to any contact. The sensation of force is lost within the machinery before it can be felt. Here, the relationship is direct. Every joint acts as an actuator/sensor combination. This allows the hand to probe and learn from each touch without the need for additional gear on top. The fingertips are outfitted with some very high-resolution tactile sensors that read normal force, contact location, and even shear pressure. That shear sensing feature is fantastic; it detects the first warning that something is ready to slip. We’ve witnessed the hand detect a glass beginning to slide and tighten up before it just barely falls. The same sensors also provide some extremely fascinating visualizations that illustrate pressure maps and where touch is during a greeting or while attempting to pick up some fragile origami.

Speed is especially noticeable in live demos, as fingers drum against a surface so quickly that you can barely see what’s going on. People in the audience yell out faster and faster rhythms; the hand maintains a steady pace before slamming on the brakes as instructed. That rapid responsiveness combined with a very wide range of motion is an excellent combination. When the occasion demands for it, fingers can stretch far beyond what a human hand can do while remaining close enough to human movement to allow operators to operate with the hand safely without colliding.

Real-world tasks, on the other hand, truly demonstrate the capabilities of this upgrade. It is perfectly capable of picking up a single screw or coin from a flat surface. It can sort grapes by color without damaging them. It can turn on a light bulb, use a screwdriver, zip up a jacket, connect a USB-C connection, pour tea from the kettle, and even make a respectable sign in American Sign Language. Delicate and powerful elements coexist on the same platform, making this a true all-purpose hand. Peak torque is 3.5 Nm at the base of the thumb and 2.6 Nm at the primary finger joints, with distal flexion forces of up to 45 N. The wrist adds 17.75 Nm, and positioning precision is ±0.2 mm.

Then there’s the durability testing, which showed that entire finger assemblies and drive units could withstand millions of cycles without failure. The wrist joints alone performed nearly 2 million cycles under strain. So, the entire hand is completely waterproof, rated IP68, and made of food-safe materials. Another advantage of NEO is that it can just rinse its own hands under the faucet, just like you would.
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