1X Updates NEO Robot Manipulator

APPSO · wechat · 2026-07-12

1X Updates NEO Manipulator Progress

1X Technologies has released a new demo for its home humanoid robot NEO, focusing on improvements in the manipulator's fine motor skills, including screwing in a lightbulb, assembling Legos, and picking grapes. Compared to last year's capabilities limited to larger objects, this update brings the robot one step closer to its 2026 sales goal for the US market.

Manipulator Details

25 Degrees of Freedom: 22 in the fingers and palm, plus an extra 3 in the wrist.
Tendon-Driven: Unlike traditional designs with motors and gears in the arm, NEO uses a biomimetic tendon-cable structure to connect the fingers, reducing hand weight and enabling force control and reverse drivability.
High-Resolution Tactile Sensing: The outer layer isn't standard rubber, but a bionic skin embedded with sensors capable of measuring normal pressure, contact location, shear force, slip tendencies, and instability.
Positioning & Torque: Hand positioning accuracy reaches ±0.2mm, peak wrist-palm joint torque is 3.5Nm, MCP peak torque is 2.6Nm, and distal flexion force reaches 45N.
Food & Safety Compliance: The manipulator meets IP68 dust/waterproof and food safety standards.

Real-World Limitations & Product Roadmap

The article stresses that the current demo is not fully autonomous: some actions were pre-programmed by engineers, while others were remotely controlled live. In other words, this showcase is more about "what NEO's hands can theoretically do" rather than completing tasks entirely via vision and language.

The author points out that 1X's commercial strategy is to deploy high-DOF hardware quickly with remote human fallback, get the product into homes, and gradually improve autonomy using real-world household data. While highly pragmatic, this means NEO might remain in a "transitional product" phase for a long time.

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1X Updates NEO Robot Manipulator

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