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.

Tesla’s alleged Optimus v3 — found inside the Tesla Android app APK 🤩 First thing that stands out: zero exposed actuators or messy wiring harnesses. Unlike Gen 2 or 2.5, every joint is sealed behind sleek, flexible shrouds—a huge deal for factory floor safety to eliminate pinch hazards, plus a massive upgrade for IP ratings against dust and grime. The torso shifts to a single, monolithic shell. This screams lightweight RIM composite rather than stamped metal, tightly packaging the 2.3 kWh battery pack and central compute stack without unnecessary seams or panel gaps. Check out the forearm bulk versus the slim wrists. Tesla clearly relocated the hand actuators up into the arm, relying on tendon-driven linkages to give the fingers higher degrees of freedom while drastically slashing inertia at the fingertips. Same story down low: tapered calves and minimal, boot-like feet. Slashing mass at the extremities cuts motor torque demands at the knees and hips, which should translate to a far smoother, more natural walking gait. Even factoring in the simplified geometry of an in-app 3D asset, the leap from an R&D test mule to a finished product is night and day. The two-tone styling and refined proportions signal Optimus is rapidly converging on its true production form factor.

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.