Robotics: Teaching Hands to Move ‘100 Times More Difficult’

In an office brimming with writhing, floating robotic hands of various weights and sizes, the founder of LinkerBot, one of China’s leading dextrous hands companies, explains the challenge.

Making a robotic hand is “one hundred times more difficult” than making a humanoid, Zhou Yong says. “Its dexterity is 10 times that of other body parts. But its volume is only one tenth of other body parts”.

Like many Chinese entrepreneurs, Zhou is inspired by the American greats. Having graduated from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, one of China’s top schools, Zhou was interested in designing apps as well as robotics. But he listened to the quote from Steve Jobs about the importance of focus (“Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things”) and decided to focus just on hands, launching LinkerBot in 2023. The company now makes about 5,000 hands a month and has plans to double that figure as it chases a valuation of $6bn. “Human hands are the most important ability of human beings,” Zhou says. “If we focus on this one point, it is easier to realise many human skills.”

Among Zhou’s ambitions are to make mass-market prosthetic hands for amputees at a fraction of the current price, which can be tens of thousands of dollars. Zhou believes his company will be able to bring the price down to just $1,000 per hand.

Making robotic hands requires solving hardware and software problems.

Thanks to a cheap, sophisticated and nimble manufacturing supply chain, Chinese companies are racing ahead on the hardware side. The rise of China’s electric vehicle industry has produced many companies that are capable of producing the components needs for robots at scale, from lithium-ion batteries to miniaturised motors.

Pan Yunzhe, the founder of Wuji Technology, a Shenzhen-based robotic hands company, says the ease of sourcing components in China is the reason he founded his company there rather than in the US, where he graduated in 2018.

“It was really impossible to do hardware in the United States because the supply chain problem is just so constraining,” he says. When he tried to start a company in the US, he needed to ask his father to post parts to him. So he decided to return to China to start his company there instead.

Teaching hands to move

Zhou and Pan are two of the thousands of entrepreneurs betting on China’s robotics hype. China has now registered more than 1m robotic companies, with registrations in 2025 up 40% on the previous year. The companies focused only on hands represent a fraction of that market, but it is growing fast. Last year the dextrous hand industry in China surpassed 50bn yuan ($7.4bn), according to Chinese media, up from 13bn yuan in 2024.

Pan says he decided to focus on hands because “the problem of manipulation is much more important than the problem of locomotion”. Humanoids can move through space, but until they can manipulate tools, they are all but useless.

The more challenging problem is software – how to teach the hands how to do things.

“The challenge of making these hands is getting solved now,” says Nathan Lepora, a professor of robotics and AI at the University of Bristol. “Controlling them, now that’s a whole different game … nobody knows how to do that.”

- Author: Amy Hawkins, The Guardian

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