Generated illustration for NEO's Hands: An API to the Physical World — Paper 37 of 41Seedream 4.0 · GMI Studio

Illustration brief the model wrote

A close-up of a robotic hand made of transparent plastic, with visible tendons and sensors inside, holding a smartphone. The palm has a glowing digital interface symbol. The arm is cutaway to show internal mechanics. No text or logos.

Provenance. Brief written by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash via GMI Cloud on 2026-09-18 from the paper's title, primary link and the editor's notes; reviewed editorially. Graphic rendered by seedream-4-0-250828 through the GMI Studio request queue (request e62de9a3…), converted to PNG locally. Summaries can be wrong; the linked paper is the source of truth.

Atlas/1X World Model Lab·Physical AI company·2026

NEO's Hands: An API to the Physical World

Model tl;dr

A 25-DoF tendon-driven hand with force transparency, tactile skin, and reflex robustness for the NEO humanoid.

tendon-driven handforce transparencytactile skinhumanoid roboticsrobust manipulationapi for robotics

What changed

Model

Before this paper, robotic hands typically lacked integrated force sensing, tactile feedback, and a mass-production design. This hand provides an API-like interface with high sensor density and robustness, enabling third-party developers to build applications on a standardized, widely available hardware platform.

So what, in plain English

Model

Imagine a hand that can feel the weight of an egg and adjust its grip instantly without crushing it—this hand does that. It gives robots a sense of touch and precise control, turning the hand into a tool that any robot programmer can use like a smartphone's touchscreen.

Contribution to industry

Model

This paper describes a mass-producible hand platform with 10,000 units planned for the year, serving as the physical API for the NEO humanoid. It provides industry-standard force and tactile sensing, enabling reliable manipulation tasks in home and service robotics, and is used by 1X and potentially third-party developers.

Typed judgments

Jev

★★★☆☆ manipulation · Physical AI 93%

Real hardware 55% · Open code / data 6% · Foundation-model based 6% · Survey / benchmark-only 5%

Probabilities from TypeSafe Jev over the title, venue and abstract; the filters on the atlas apply code-owned thresholds to these numbers.

Editor's notes

Summary. A 25 degree-of-freedom tendon-driven hand with force transparency, tactile skin, low distal inertia and reflex-level robustness, built as the sensing and actuation layer for the NEO humanoid.

Industry. Treats the hand as the platform API for third-party robot applications and, with 10,000 units planned for the year, targets the hardware ceiling on what humanoid developers can build.

Read the paper ↗Official lab page ↗All 2 1X World Model Lab papers →