AINEWS
1X's Neo Puts Tendon-Powered Hands on a $20,000 Home Robot
Norwegian American startup 1X has begun production of Neo, a soft humanoid whose cable driven fingers can wash themselves under a tap. Early access starts at $20,000.
Norwegian American startup 1X has begun production of Neo, a soft humanoid whose cable driven fingers can wash themselves under a tap. Early access starts at $20,000.
1X Technologies, a Norwegian-American robotics company, has begun full-scale production of a humanoid designed to live in a house rather than a factory floor or a defense contract. The clearest evidence of that bet sits at the end of each arm: a hand with 25 degrees of freedom, the number of independent ways a joint can move, and an IP68 waterproof rating that lets the robot rinse itself under a kitchen tap. (Wired)
Production is running at 1X's Hayward, California facility, with early-access buyers paying $20,000 outright or $500 per month and lump-sum customers prioritized for delivery. (Forbes, The Robot Report) That price places Neo in the same bracket as a high-end electric vehicle, not the consumer-electronics tier the domestic use case implies. The company has warned pricing can shift before general availability, and capacity and yield numbers for the Hayward line have not been disclosed.
Each finger pulls against the others using cables arranged to mimic how tendons move human hands, so the joints flex, extend, and hyperextend in directions human digits cannot. Slip detection sits in the fingertips, and cameras on Neo's head feed an AI model that decides how much force to apply based on what is being held. Jonathan Terfurth told Wired the goal is range of motion that lets the robot fit into spaces designed for people. "We want to make sure that it can actually interact with the world like a human does," Terfurth said. (Wired)
The design lands in a humanoid market still dominated by stronger, stiffer machines aimed at industrial and defense work. Neo's wider body is wrapped in a soft 3D-lattice shell inspired by Baymax, the inflatable healthcare companion from Disney's Big Hero 6. (Wikipedia) 1X is backed by OpenAI and has disclosed roughly $100 million in funding, giving it financial weight against better-capitalized defense-oriented peers. (VentureBeat)
In December, 1X struck a deal to place units of Neo into factories and warehouses, an explicit acknowledgement that domestic demand alone does not yet justify production volumes. (TechCrunch) The same compliant hand that is supposed to lift a coffee mug will need to lift whatever its first warehouse customer hands it.
Independent safety certification for unsupervised use around children or pets has not been cited, and the early-access cohort is small enough that any household incident becomes a public data point. The first wave of buyers will find out, one way or another, whether a 25-degree hand soft enough to wash itself is also durable enough to do the dishes every night.