ROBOTICS & INDUSTRY ·
Nobody wins the humanoid race.
🤖 Nobody wins the humanoid race.
And the factor that may decide the race is not even on the robot.
Everyone is watching the demos from#optimus, the flips from#Atlas, the low price of#Unitree. Meanwhile, the real bottleneck is elsewhere: the hands.
A human hand has 27 degrees of freedom. No one in this race has yet produced a hand that is reliable, durable, precise and manufactured at scale. Not#Tesla, nor#Figure, nor#BostonDynamics.
And that is what everyone is overlooking.#Figurewent from one robot per day to one robot per hour in less than 120 days: impressive, but that is assembly, not dexterity.#Unitreesells a complete humanoid for $13,500: it competes on price and volume, not on hand precision.#Teslahas the world’s largest real-driving dataset and still describes its own production of hands and actuators as “extremely slow at first.” That is#Muskwho said it!
Whoever first produces a reliable hand at a sustainable cost will gain more than a line on a specification sheet. They could move ahead of everyone else overnight.
In every gold rush, the money was made on the component nobody else knew how to manufacture, not on the flashiest prototype.
And#France🇫🇷 in all this? We have the engineers. We have precision mechanics, machining, metrology, laboratories that have worked on grasping and force feedback for twenty years, and a mechatronics tradition that can compete with anyone. We had Aldebaran, we have Wandercraft helping people walk,#PollenRoboticswhich was eventually acquired by#HuggingFace. In other words: we know how to build things, and when we do it well, others buy them.
So what are we waiting for?
The hand problem is not a ten-billion-dollar capital race. It is precision mechanics, actuators, tactile sensors and reliability over one hundred thousand cycles. Exactly the kind of field where a country of#aéroand automotive subcontractors has a role to play. There is no need to win the race to the complete humanoid. It may be enough to supply the component others cannot produce.