Among Hands – Reflections from IROS 2025
There’s a certain hum that follows you through the exhibition halls – not the buzz of conversation, but the layered vibration of motors waking up, servos twitching, and compressed air breathing softly through tubes. You hear it before you see it. Then, one by one, the hands appear. Some are suspended in glass boxes, others mounted on stands, a few attached to half-built torsos that seem to wait for a command. One hand grips a cup with exaggerated caution. Another turns a screwdriver, stops, and adjusts its angle as if thinking. And somewhere in that small hesitation, in that almost-human pause, lies the heart of the humanoid story.
At IROS this year, it’s not the legs that draw the crowds anymore. It’s the hands (Read more about hands here).
A quiet revolution
For two decades, robotics has been obsessed with movement – walking, running, climbing, balancing. The breakthroughs have been spectacular, but also strangely abstract: feats of coordination without context. Hands change that. They bring robots into contact with the tangible world, and contact always changes both sides.
What’s striking, standing among these prototypes, is how many philosophies coexist. Some engineers place the entire mechanism inside the palm – compact, muscular, immediate. Others pull the weight back into the forearm, running tendons through narrow channels, imitating anatomy. You can hear their debates in the air: simplicity versus sensitivity, precision versus grace, reliability versus realism.
A senior engineer nearby murmurs that “the hand is the slowest part to evolve and the fastest to fail.” He’s right. The hand is where every contradiction meets: soft but strong, complex yet intuitive, endlessly capable but constantly at risk.
Lessons from experience
In the Humanoid Robot Market Report 2026, one of the contributors said something that lingers as I watch these demos: the hand is both the most human and the most humbling technology we build. That perspective runs through nearly every booth here. Engineers no longer talk about how high a robot can jump; they talk about how gently it can lift.
Boston Dynamics’ former CTO described how a single human hand has more degrees of freedom than the rest of the body combined – and how each joint hides a dozen trade-offs between cost, weight, and control. Looking around, you see those trade-offs everywhere. A hand that looks elegant may lack torque. Another that can crush a brick might drop a strawberry. Perfection is still out of reach, but progress is visible in the tiny, precise tremors before every successful grasp.
The art of control
What fascinates me most isn’t the hardware – though that alone could fill museums – but the control. These hands are learning through data, not design. Each motion is recorded, analysed, replayed, corrected. Thousands of micro-failures teaching a robot the difference between a slip and a squeeze.
In one corner, a demo loop shows a pair of robotic hands folding a towel. They miss, reset, and try again. The crowd chuckles quietly, but you can sense admiration. The engineers nearby aren’t embarrassed; they’re proud. Every failed fold adds to the growing dataset that will someday make the gesture effortless.
That patience defines this new phase of robotics – an era less about spectacular videos and more about repetition, refinement, and realism. We’ve entered the age of tactile learning.
From metal to meaning
There’s also something almost emotional about watching a machine imitate touch. Not just motion, but intention. A robot that waits half a second before closing its grip feels more alive than one that acts instantly. That delay – that moment of simulated consideration – invites us in.
The Humanoid Report noted that hands are becoming the interface between digital thought and physical reality. It’s a poetic line, but standing here, it feels literal. Each fingertip translates computation into contact. Each grasp turns data into consequence.
And in that process, we glimpse a new kind of intelligence – one that isn’t measured in gigaflops, but in sensitivity.
Sensing the world
One display shows a translucent polymer glove wired with sensors fine enough to detect the texture of paper. When it runs over a strip of velvet, a graph flickers across the screen in delicate waves. Someone behind me whispers, “It’s feeling.” It’s easy to underestimate how radical that is. For decades, robots have seen the world through cameras. Now they are beginning to feel it. Tactile sensing is the missing sense that turns a manipulator into a collaborator. Combined with embodied AI – systems that learn not just from code but from contact – this will change everything from assembly lines to assisted living. A decade ago, this would have been science fiction. Today, it’s a line in a spec sheet.
The long road to reliability
Still, reality is stubborn. These hands are fragile. Cables snap. Motors heat. Sensors drift. As one researcher told me, “The physics doesn’t scale like the demos do.” But the report had already anticipated this – pointing out that reliability, cost, and safety remain the true bottlenecks. You can feel those constraints hanging in the air like the smell of solder. And yet, there’s optimism too. Every small fix, every overnight iteration, shortens the distance between the lab and the living room. The engineers here know it. Their prototypes may still fumble, but they do so with purpose. Each failure is a rehearsal for the day a robot hand will pick up your coffee mug without you even noticing.
The human parallel
Watching these mechanical fingers move, I start thinking about our own. How they shaped our evolution – from tools to art, from writing to building. The hand is not just a limb; it’s how humanity learned to externalize thought. Now, we are teaching machines the same trick. That’s why so many people at IROS look oddly emotional when a robot succeeds in something trivial – tying a knot, stacking blocks, holding a pen. Those gestures contain echoes of ourselves. They remind us that technology, at its best, is an act of reflection. One developer tells me quietly, “It’s not about making robots like humans; it’s about making humans more aware of what we do naturally.”
What lies ahead
If you read between the lines of this year’s market forecasts, the pattern is clear: the next great leap for humanoids won’t come from faster legs or cheaper batteries. It will come from hands that are reliable enough, sensitive enough, and affordable enough to enter daily life. That’s when the humanoid shift truly begins – when robots move from mobility to manipulation. When they don’t just exist in our spaces, but participate in them.
Walking out of the exhibition, I pass one last demo. A robot hand waves, clumsy but sincere. It’s a small gesture, easy to overlook. But in it I see the arc of an entire industry – the movement from command to connection. Maybe that’s what this field is really about: not teaching machines to act like us, but teaching us to recognize ourselves in what they learn. And as the hall lights dim, the last servo slows to silence. Somewhere behind me, a hand rests open — waiting for its next instruction, or maybe just for someone to reach back.
Ready for the full hands on overview?
Humanoid Guide just launched the 2026 Humanoid Robot Market Report. Inside, you’ll find the latest research, breakthroughs, and products driving the next frontier in humanoid robotics, focusing on dexterous robotic hands. A dedicated chapter explores why hands represent the final and most challenging step toward unlocking real-world utility for humanoid robots.
The report features insights from leading experts across the open source community, 1X Technologies, Boston Dynamics, and other industry pioneers, offering a deep look at how grasp, touch, and fine manipulation are shaping the humanoid revolution.
The 2026 Humanoid Robot Market Analysis is the most comprehensive view and analysis on the humanoid market to date. 170 pages with deep insights into all the aspects surrounding the humanoid robotics industry.
