XMAQUINA portfolio company 1X has introduced a new generation of tendon-driven hands for NEO, its humanoid robot designed to operate in everyday home environments.
The new system features 25 degrees of freedom and was developed to provide near-human levels of dexterity, strength, safety and reliability. According to 1X, every NEO will be equipped with the newly designed hands.
Hands are one of the most important components of a general-purpose humanoid. While a robot’s artificial intelligence allows it to understand instructions and its mobility system enables it to navigate an environment, its hands determine how effectively it can interact with physical objects.
Conventional robotic grippers are often limited to basic actions such as picking up, placing or pushing objects. A more capable hand gives a humanoid access to a broader range of movements, allowing it to manipulate objects with greater precision and adapt its grip according to the task.
1X describes the hands as an interface between the robot’s intelligence and the physical world. By reducing hardware limitations around dexterity, the company intends to make NEO’s future capabilities increasingly dependent on the quality of its training data and AI models rather than the limitations of its end effectors.
The development arrives as 1X continues scaling NEO’s production. Its operational factory in Hayward, California, is ramping toward an initial annual production capacity of 10,000 units. The company is also working toward substantially greater capacity as additional manufacturing infrastructure comes online.
XMAQUINA highlighted the release as another milestone for 1X and described a humanoid as a computer whose application programming interface is its hands. The progress reflects the growing importance of dexterous manipulation as humanoid robots move closer to practical deployment in human environments.
