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.

Unitree Launches A Humanoid Robot Hand for $6,000 Unitree Robotics is attacking the dextrous hand bottleneck with the Dex5-S, a dexterous robotic hand with 22 degrees of freedom, up from 20 in its previous model The new hand weighs 620 grams, supports a maximum payload of 2 kg and a continuous working load of 1 kg. The Pro version adds tactile sensing Prices start at $6,000 per hand

Robotics deep dive: THREE FINGERS OR FIVE The robot-hand world is arguing about finger count, and a startup went and checked the data. Tacta @TactaSystems put tactile gloves on expert factory workers in Japan, China, Vietnam, Mexico and Taiwan, and watched what the best hands actually do. The finding: high-value precision work comes down to three fingers. A thumb, an index and a middle finger do the picking, placing, inserting and threading. The ring and the little finger mostly go along for the ride. Look at your own hand holding a pen or a small part: two of your fingers are just there for support. The robot even improves on the human here. A robot finger does not tire and does not overheat, so it can hold a 2 kg part for days without a break. So why does almost everyone still build five? The honest answer is the training data, not the task. Five fingers match the human hand you are learning from, which closes the embodiment gap between the demonstration and the robot. That congruency is why the five-finger camp is prominent. Tacta's answer is to not be dogmatic about it. Three fingers for the job, because it is simpler, cheaper and more robust. Five if a customer wants the human match. The design is modular, so you can even add a sixth. The lesson here: let the data pick the finger count.

Reportedly, the world's fastest high-DoF hand has been developed by LinkerBot, which also featured at the World Humanoid Robot Games finals. The Linker Hand L30 is a tendon-driven robot hand with 22 degrees of freedom, 18 of them actively driven and 4 passive. The company pitches it for research, medical assistance and precision industrial assembly. Cables act as tendons to pull the finger joints, the way tendons move a human hand. LinkerBot pairs them with high-resolution encoders and tendon-tension control, which it says gives the hand ±0.2 mm repeatability. Speed: full open or close in 0.2 s, finger flexion up to 363.6°/s, thumb flexion up to 450.35°/s Force: 9 N at each fingertip, 6.5 N at the thumb, 39 N five-finger grip, 15 kg maximum load Sensing: tactile sensor arrays in the fingertips Integration: CAN FD and Mini-USB, 500 Hz communication, 24 V DC, 1,192 g LinkerBot also makes the O6, a smaller linkage-driven hand with 6 active degrees of freedom, a 70 N grip and a listed weight of 360 g. Beijing-based LinkerBot closed a Series B+ round in April at a reported $3 billion valuation.

Haptic feedback support for MANUS is now available in NVIDIA Isaac Teleop. In Isaac Lab teleoperation workflows, contact signals from the simulated robot hand can now be translated into per-finger vibrotactile feedback on the operator’s glove. The MANUS integration receives haptic commands through Isaac Teleop and drives the glove’s five finger vibration motors via the MANUS SDK. This adds haptic feedback to the existing high-fidelity hand tracking integration and provides operators with an additional feedback channel during teleoperation and demonstration recording. We appreciate the @NVIDIARobotics team’s continued work on the MANUS integration and the close collaboration that made this possible. Read the @nvidia documentation: