Chinese humanoid pioneer Unitree Robotics has unveiled a new dexterous hand, the Dex5-S, priced from $6,500 and aimed at giving robotics developers a cheaper path to human-grade manipulation. The company teased the hardware on September 22, 2026 with a demo video showing the hand tightening screws, folding cloth and holding an egg without breaking it.
22 Backdrivable Joints At Human Scale
The Dex5-S offers 22 degrees of freedom, all fully driven and backdrivable, in a package that mirrors the size and proportions of an adult human hand. Every joint carries limit and impact-torque protection, and Unitree says dual encoders enable smooth force-feedback control that makes teleoperation and imitation-learning workflows more reliable than earlier generations.
An Upgrade From The Dex5-1
The Dex5-S extends Unitree's earlier Dex5-1 hand, which offered 20 degrees of freedom (16 active, four passive). At roughly RMB 39,900, the new price undercuts most rival humanoid hands with comparable articulation, echoing Unitree's playbook of pushing humanoid components down the cost curve to seed a developer ecosystem.
Why It Matters For The Humanoid Race
Manipulation, not locomotion, is now the humanoid industry's tightest bottleneck. Cheap, richly instrumented hands make it far easier for research labs and start-ups to collect the imitation-learning demonstrations that world-model policies need. Unitree already ships its G1+ humanoid and quadruped platforms, and rivals such as 1X Technologies and RLWRLD are aggressively scaling their own robot programs.
Reporting based on coverage from Pandaily, AlphaSignal and DigiTimes.