About a month ago I sat down with Dar Sleeper, the head of product design at 1X, and he showed me video of the company’s new humanoid robot hands that was basically mind-blowing: fast, precise motion that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. I mentioned that in my story but I couldn’t reveal exactly what I had seen.
Today I can, and Neo’s hands are even more impressive than I thought at the time. Now you can see them for yourself:
The headline spec? 25 degrees of freedom – all of them actuated (think powered, under control) – and tendon-driven motion, resulting in what 1X calls near human-level dexterity, strength and reliability.
But there’s a lot more here, including backdrivability, touch sensors on the fingers, strength to lift a 20-pound kettlebell, and delicacy enough to pick grapes off their stems, install a light bulb and pick up a screw on the floor.
Most robot hands are numb, but not this one
Most robot hands are essentially “write-only.”
You command the hand to move to a position, it goes there, and no data comes back. It doesn’t feel anything the way a human feels things. The reason is aggressive gearing — often 100-to-1 or 200-to-1 — which swallows any contact force feedback before it ever reaches the motor. The hand is effectively numb.
Neo’s hand runs at dramatically lower gear ratios, roughly 5-to-1 to 15-to-1, using tendons to pull the fingers. The result is that every single joint is simultaneously a motor and a sensor. Push on a finger and it gives — it’s backdrivable — and it reports exactly how hard you pushed.
1X calls this “force transparency.” Force flows out; information flows back; the robot knows what’s happening at its fingertips.
That’s a big deal, because it’s how humans learn to handle unfamiliar objects. We touch, we press, we turn, we shake. We’re essentially asking questions with our fingers: how hard is this, how heavy, what texture? And we’re “reading” the answers back through the same fingers that asked.
Neo can now do a version of that.
Skin that feels touch, hands that can wash themselves
This isn’t just the standard humanoid robot set of hard fingers on a claw.
There’s a skin layer doing real work: high-resolution tactile sensing across the fingertips that measures pressure, contact location, and shear — the sideways force that tells the hand something is about to slip.
So when an object starts sliding out of its grip, Neo will theoretically feel it and be able to re-grip in real time … just like humans.
Importantly, and pretty uniquely, these hands are washable. As in: Neo can wash its own hands. They’re IP68 sealed, just like your phone, so Neo can immerse them in water without any problems. Think about what that enables. If you want Neo to fry you an egg, or prep dinner by chopping tomatoes and carrots for a salad, it can clean up after itself. If you want Neo to make your child a peanut-butter sandwich, and it gets some peanut butter on its fingers (I mean, who doesn’t?), being able to wash its own hands means it can now do more work for you without spreading peanut butter on your furniture or laundry.
(The comparable here is the Roomba that runs over the mess your pet left on the floor and helpfully spreads it all around your house.)
I’m not aware of any other robot today that can wash its own hands.
Importantly, they should be durable as well. 1X says the hands have been through millions of test cycles, with wrist joints proven past two million cycles under load.
Why hands are so important
In its announcement, 1X makes a point I strongly agree with: while legs are for getting your robot somewhere, and the body is for housing the battery and the compute, the hands are what do the actual work. They’re what make a humanoid robot genuinely useful: folding clothes, putting away laundry, vacuuming, cooking, whatever the chore is. Hands are essential for all of it.
In a pretty real sense, the rest of the body is a delivery mechanism so the hands get where they need to go.
There’s also some runway here. When I spoke with Sleeper, he told me Neo will ship with more hardware capability than the AI currently knows how to use. In other words, the hardware is ahead of the software, which means that over-the-air updates should make each Neo progressively smarter and more capable over time.
Great hands are critically important for great humanoid robots, and there’s a real race on to build them. Genesis AI recently emerged from stealth to unveil the hands behind Eno, its humanoid robot, and they’re impressive as well. Kyber Labs, which doesn’t make the whole robot but just the hands, also has some very impressive hands.
Whenever I think about robot hands, I remember what Geordie Rose, who was the founder of Sanctuary AI, a humanoid robotics company in Vancouver, Canada, told me: robot hands are half the complexity of a robot.
You can see that in the picture at the top of this story: there’s so many motors and gears and tendons – for tendon-driven hands – in top-end hands. They need to be strong, flexible, cleanable, durable and ideally just about as capable as our own.
That just might be an impossibly high bar, at least over the next decade. But seeing what 1X just shipped, I think we’re starting to get much closer than I ever expected at this stage.
Neo is aimed at the home for now. And after seeing these hands the “robot that does your chores” pitch feels less like pie in the sky and more like something pretty real.
