It’s like everyday is a new breakthrough in robotics. X Square just benchmarked a three finger robot hand on tasks like twisting bottle caps, opening books, operating syringes, and even a full 24-step chemistry experiment. The setup is called TwinDEX. Instead of teleoperating the robot directly, they built a wearable hand that matches the robot hand’s geometry, sensors, and contact surfaces, so humans can demonstrate tasks naturally and the data transfers much more cleanly to the robot. X Square says it reached up to 5.3x the effective data-collection throughput of on-robot teleoperation. The other part I like is that they actually tested how many fingers and DoF you really need. For their current task set, three fingers with 7 active DoF gave the best balance of dexterity, cost, complexity, and reliability. For cheaper humanoids, maybe companies that want to deliver cost effectively shouldn’t ask “how do we copy the human hand exactly?” but “where is the best trade-off?” (This is probably obvious to them) however what’s not is the right balance that happens to be benchmarked. A strong thumb plus two opposing fingers might capture most useful manipulation while keeping hardware far cheaper, simpler, and more reliable.