NEW ROBOT HAND: This one is maxing out the degrees of freedom!
Yuequan Bionic Technology (北京大器月泉仿生) is a Chinese firm building bionic humanoid robots and their core components
Founded by a father-son academic team: Ren Luquan (Chinese Academy of Sciences academician, Jilin University) and Ren Lei (tenured University of Manchester professor, 25 years in bionic robotics).
Its flagship is the Ying Shou Y-Hand M1, a dexterous hand it claims has 38 degrees of freedom (breaking the current global record), a 28.7 kg grip, 0.2 s finger closure, and 0.04 mm positioning accuracy, able to thread needles, twist playing cards, unscrew bottle caps and turn pages.
The hand is built on the founders' Bionic Tensile-Compressive Body Robot Theory, a rigid-flexible design mimicking human skeletal-muscular anatomy driven by magnetic collector-driven artificial muscles.
Around it sit a lower-DoF X-Hand M1 (11 DoF, 530 tactile units), a bipedal X-Bot, and a wheeled W-Bot billed as the world's smallest, with a roadmap to a ~70-DoF Y-Hand M3.
I wonder why go for the DoF-maxxing route when other manufacturers seem to converge on ~23 ?
38 now, ~70 next, exceeding the human hand, but a human hand is only ~21–27 DoF, and Sharpa's 22-DoF hand (arguably one of the best in the market) still fails force tasks (screw-bulb 36% on Gemini Robotics 2).
Joint count is being marketed as capability, but the binding constraint is force-controlled contact and control, not more joints.
More DoF just means more tiny actuators to coordinate.
Their approach to actuation is genuinely new however: tensile-compressive rigid-flexible coupling with muscle-like antagonistic drive, not tendon-cables or rigid rotary joints.
Most dexterous hands are tendon-driven (Mimic's 16-DoF cable hand) or rigid-jointed.
Yuequan claims an anatomy-mimicking rigid-flexible body driven by magnetic collector-driven artificial muscles.
If real, that antagonistic muscle approach is what would buy the 28.7kg grip and 0.2s closure with compliance —> a genuinely different mechanical philosophy.
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