SerpApi.Org
A company called 1X seems to have cracked the code on robot hand dexterity. Watch them pick grapes, use zippers, and lift weights.
Robot makers strived for decades to make their androids walk like humans. It was hard, halting work. Honda’s ASIMO, for example, wowed audiences in the early 2000s with human-like strides—but was almost as famous for its dramatic on-stage tumbles. It took until the last five years or so for researchers to solve the walking problem, and now Boston Dynamics’ Atlas can run and do parkour. At the same time, AI has given robots the ability to talk like humans and even see a bit like us.
But until now, androids—even sophisticated ones—have shared one very un-humanlike feature: clumsy hands. Palo Alto, California-based robot startup 1X may have now fixed this, showing off robot hands that make your own puny fingers look simple.
Check them out:
This isn’t an actor with rubber gloves on. It’s a machine. And realizing that may even give you the creeps.
Having human-like hands isn’t necessary for every type of robot–-industrial welding machines in car factories do dazzling work without them. But for a host of jobs that we hope robots will do in the near future, like working in homes, offices, and healthcare spaces, having human-like hands is vital. That’s because these environments have been designed around human needs and the shape of our bodies. Lots of companies making new humanoid robots, like Tesla and Figure, have given their robots very useful hands and fingers. But when you watch these in action it’s easy to imagine them failing at an ultra fine-detail task like fetching a tissue from a box or twirling a screwdriver.
Enter 1X’s new hands for its NEO robot. These manipulators are “25 Degree of Freedom (DOF), tendon-driven hands” the company’s site explains, promising that they achieve “near human-level dexterity, strength, safety, and reliability.” Why is 25 degrees of freedom important? Take a look at your hand. Clench your fist, wiggle your fingers back and forth. Fingers don’t just curl and grip—they can stretch individually, and two or more can cooperate on one task while the others do something else. Remember when you held three bags of shopping in your hands the other day, and fumbled for your door keys with a spare finger and thumb?
1X’s trick has been to copy the way human hands work. The joints aren’t moved by motors, like other robot manipulators. They’re pulled by tendon-like wires connected to tiny sensor-packed motors in the robot’s forearm. That’s just like how human hands work—you may be surprised to learn that you, too, lack muscles in your fingers. The sophisticated movement of all these wires makes NEO’s fingers bend, stretch, flex left and right just like yours move via strong, springy tendons. Just watch the way the robot can handle picking grapes and manipulate a gaming controller in the video.
There’s another smart part of NEO’s hands: just like human fingers, they have a sense of force-feedback. If you push on NEO’s fingers, they yield, and the movement tells the robot how much force was applied. This gives the robot a type of proprioception—the ability to know where its fingers are without looking. We’re not talking about rough positioning—1X promises half-millimeter precision, aided by sensors in the robot’s skin-like, waterproof, food-safe covering.
All of this means NEO’s hands are pliable but strong. Check them out being hit by a hammer in the demo video, then completing their task. Forget the kind of human-mincing metal claw fingers you’ve seen in sci-fi movies like Terminator: NEO’s hands could be safe enough to handshake.
Why should you care about robot hands?
The answer boils down to some words from 1X’s post: the innovative new hands remove “the hardware ceiling on what humanoid robots can actually do, and make data the only barrier to capabilities.” Ultimately this means “AI models are no longer limited by dexterity.”
1X is saying that humanoid robots with their hands could be all but ready to step up for duty in the real world—the only limit is the AI training needed.
Whether critics like it or not, it seems inevitable that humanoid robots are going to be a common sight sooner rather than later. 1X is a medium-sized company, founded in 2014 by Norwegian roboticist Bernt Øivind Børnich, and while it’s raised over $120 million in funding thus far and is growing, it’s still quite small. Tesla, a trillion dollar-scale outfit, has bet much of its future on humanoids and is revamping some former car production lines to make humanoid robots.
With dextrous hands like 1X’s new ones, duties like cooking, cleaning, changing the printer cartridge, gardening, laundry, adjusting a sick person’s pillows for comfort and countless more skills are within reach for robots.
Your company may have been surprised by the AI revolution. And while you may not want to put android purchases in your budget for next year, you may want to consider them for your five-year plan. Better yet, you should start thinking about how your human staff will work alongside the tech, just as they’re having to do with disruptive, job-upending, powerful AI.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
“Click here to subscribe to the Inc. newsletter: inc.com/newsletters"
