Xiaomi has disclosed research progress on a high-degree-of-freedom bionic hand aimed at factory work, posting the details through its official technology channel on October 27. This is a development update rather than a product launch: the company has not announced pricing, availability or a commercial partner for the hand.
The design starts from work the company already does. Xiaomi's robotics team took 2,579 standard operating procedures from 16 typical workstation types at the pilot production centre of its EV unit's intelligent manufacturing department, then selected 1,827 of them for video and motion-capture recording. The resulting dataset covers more than 70.8 percent of manual work procedures across those typical stations, according to the company.
Xiaomi says it used that data, together with analysis of how often each degree of freedom was actually used, how joints move together and ablation tests in grasping simulation, to argue that 21 degrees of freedom is the current balance point for factory tasks. Against versions with six to 15 degrees of freedom, the company reports an average stable-grasp success rate 15 to 38 percent higher, while going beyond 23 degrees of freedom produced clearly diminishing returns. Those figures come from Xiaomi's own evaluation.
The hardware is a hybrid drive: mostly tendon-driven, with five direct-drive degrees of freedom, for 26 motors in total. The tendon motors sit in the forearm rather than the hand, leaving the palm itself at 324 grams, which the team says lowers inertia at the end of the arm and sharpens control response. Tendon tension control handles grip force.
Touch sensing is dense. The hand carries 1,500 sensing points across the whole palm, with 1-millimetre spatial resolution between and under the fingers and 2-millimetre resolution in the palm, in modules designed to be swapped and serviced. Xiaomi frames that as useful not only for grasping but for collecting human-hand tactile data, since the layout mirrors the glove the team used earlier.
Packing 26 motors into a hand creates heat. The team developed a thermal prediction model and a heat-dissipating fabric, with the model forecasting temperature changes five to 10 minutes ahead to better than three degrees Celsius so cooling can be scheduled in advance.
Xiaomi has been feeding its own car plant into its robotics work for over a year, and this hand reads as the same loop: factory procedures in, specifications out.
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