1X gives NEO hands that can feel a grip slipping — 25 force-controlled degrees of freedom, IP68, 10,000 units a year

1X has replaced the hands on its NEO humanoid with a tendon-driven design that the company positions as its answer to the hardest part of home robotics: touching things that were not designed for robots. The numbers 1X publishes are unusually specific. The hand carries 25 degrees of freedom — 22 fully actuated in the fingers and palm, three at the wrist — and, crucially, all 25 are natively force-controlled and fully backdrivable. That is the difference between a gripper that closes to a commanded position and one that closes until it feels the right amount of resistance. The drive is quasi-direct: 1X's own tendon system running gear ratios of roughly 5:1 to 15:1, low enough that external forces travel back through the mechanism instead of being absorbed by a gearbox. Strength and delicacy are quoted side by side: 3.5 Nm peak torque at the thumb CMC joint, 2.6 Nm at the finger MCP joints, up to 45 N of distal flexion force and 17.75 Nm at the wrist, with positioning accuracy of ±0.2 mm. Tactile sensing runs across the fingertips and surfaces and measures three things — normal force, contact location and shear. Shear is the one that matters for the headline: it is what lets the robot notice an object starting to slide and tighten its grip before the object falls, rather than after. Two details point at a machine meant to live in a kitchen rather than a lab. The hand is rated IP68 and built from food-safe polymers and components, so it can be washed. And 1X says wrist joints have been proven beyond two million cycles under high loads, with components tested to millions of cycles. The part that is hardest to fake is manufacturing. 1X says hundreds of the hands have already come off a scalable production line, with capacity for 10,000 hands in 2026. "These hands are the culmination of intensive engineering focused on making humanoids truly useful," said chief executive Bernt Børnich. Hands remain the bottleneck for every humanoid programme: they are the component with the worst ratio of degrees of freedom to available space, and the one that wears out first. A vendor quoting cycle-life figures and a production line — rather than a demo video — is the more telling signal here.