- Neo Beta robot hands have human-level dexterity
- They use tendon-like controls instead of in-hand motors
- They’re waterproof and can perform many skills normally reserved for human hands
Neo’s new robot hands are so good and lifelike, you might assume that they’re gloved human hands, and then you might wonder why someone is swinging a hammer at them.
In a new demo video recently released on YouTube by Neo Beta robot parent company 1X, you can watch a pair of Neo Hands screw in a lightbulb and pull the chain switch (before someone inexplicably shatters the bulb with a hammer), pluck grapes off a bunch and drop each one in a container, carefully pickup a screw, unzip a jacket (a bit creepy), and even open a small bag of Funyuns onion ring snacks.
In that last bit, someone swings a hammer at the hands while they work, which they pay no mind to, before the bag is unsealed.
It even expertly builds a small Lego stack. Okay, okay, they’re the larger Duplo blocks, but it still does as good a job as your average kindergartner.
The hands move slowly but also with a grace and ease you might mistake for humanness. This appears to be down to the underlying technology.
As 1X described it, the rubber-covered, waterproof hands use a “closed-loop tendon-driven system”. This means that 1X moves the motors or servos out of the hand and back along the arm, which keeps the hand smaller and more supple. Those motors are then connected to an intricate system of tendon-like connectors that are pulled and released to enable the robot hands’ movement and manipulation. That style of control more closely resembles our own hands, which, while including muscle, are also filled with tendons that are pulled inside the forearm.
1X says the fingers, palm, and thumb have 25 degrees of freedom, but, as evidenced in the video, they can also over-extend backward in a rather unnatural or certainly more-than-human way.
The robot hands feature some impressive strength, too, lifting a 20 lb. dumbbell and then, with just one finger, curling a smaller pulley weight.
Naturally, the fingers include sensors so that the hands and robot know when it’s gripping something and how much force is or should be applied. That’s how the Neo robot hand avoids breaking that light bulb (unlike that hammer).
Next-level grace
I know, just last week, we heard about a pair of robots performing gall-bladder surgery on a pig. You’d think that those humanoid hands must’ve been far more graceful. However, those robots each simply gripped a pair of laparoscopic controls so that the finer control, where the cutting and suturing was done, happened at the end of those devices. No robot hand directly manipulated the scalpels.
While Neo’s robot hands will be useful for all kinds of home helper chores when the $20,000 Neo finally arrives in consumer homes (early adopters may be receiving them now), the hands are also useful for helping itself: In the video, a Neo Beta robot uses the hands to pick up its MagSafe-style charging puck, which it carefully attaches to its robot hip.
1X writes that these hands will deliver new real-world training data to its robotic development, and one would assume this will ultimately make the Neo robots even better home helpers, companions, and enablers (all those Funyuns).
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
