A robot that can feel your touch is impressive. A robot that can sweat? That’s a whole different league.
Xiaomi just unveiled a human-sized robotic hand that doesn’t just grip and move like ours, it senses pressure, reacts to heat, and even cools itself through an artificial sweating system. It’s a striking leap in a field where hands, not brains, have long been the hardest problem to solve.
For years, robotics has struggled with one stubborn limitation: true dexterity. Machines could lift, sort, and assemble, but they lacked the subtle awareness that lets humans handle a cracked egg or adjust grip mid-slip. Xiaomi’s latest CyberOne upgrade aims to close that gap, turning robotic hands from blunt tools into responsive, almost lifelike interfaces.
With full-palm sensing, improved flexibility, and a built-in cooling system inspired by human biology, this development represents a rethink of how robots interact with the physical world.
Sensors lead the way, covering the entire palm
Until now, the CyberOne robot, like most other robots, has had sensors only on its fingertips. To compensate for this limitation, they often combined vision sensors, which still struggle with fine force control and occluded interactions, especially for industrial use.
In its official announcement, the company revealed that its CyberOne robots can now feel across their fingertips, finger pads, and the entire palm. With a coverage area of 8200 mm², the size of an average human palm, the CyberOne humanoid would no longer have dead ends in one of its most important parts.
By creating what it calls a “full-palm tactile sensing”, Xiaomi engineers just upped the robot’s efficiency. As such, the robot can adjust its grip based on contact, detect slipping objects, and also handle fragile objects more safely.
Image: Xiaomi
Xiaomi engineers didn’t stop at full-palm tactile sensing.
To further enhance how reliably its robots use their sensors, the engineers fed it training data from haptic gloves worn by human operators. Combining these data with the robots’ expanded sensors allows them to understand how best to use their palms for picking, holding, and gripping as humans do.
An automatic temperature regulation
Underneath the metal enclosure of a robot is actually a computer system, with a powerful chip, network communications, and wires carrying electrical signals. All of these emit heat that must be managed for robots to continue working properly.
For robots operating in industrial environments like factories, where they must work at peak capacity for hours, internal heat regulation is non-negotiable, regardless of the air-cooling systems in place. Replicating the sweating process, this new hand is designed to have its own artificial sweat gland.
Image: Xiaomi
Interesting Engineering notes that, to mimic the sweat glands, the company used a 3D-printed metal liquid channel through which cooling liquid flows and, through evaporation, absorbs heat. While details on how the liquid circulates were not disclosed, the system is designed to dissipate heat through evaporation.
Although neither Xiaomi nor Interesting Engineering provided details on how the cooling system circulates, based on typical examples of how such technology works, the now-heated liquid should cool off in a cooler part of the robot.
A smaller hand, redesigned for precise manipulation
To reach precision levels near that of humans, the new hand is now smaller than previous versions. Xiaomi cut the hands’ size by 60%, bringing the ratio to humans to 1:1, according to Interesting Engineering. The new hand is designed with the proportions of a 1.73-meter-tall human.
The company says this new size will help the robot “operate more naturally” in factory operations.
Positive results with a potentially great future
According to Xiaomi, early test results show great potential in the use of these new robot hands.
Xiaomi data shared by Interesting Engineering indicates that in a factory-style testing, Xiaomi used the upgraded CyberOne hand to tighten nuts, which showed:
- A 90.2% success rate in a 76-second cycle for three hours. This means that within a fixed 76-second window, it achieved a 9-out-of-10 success rate over three hours of continuous testing.
Not only did this upgraded hand work reliably, but Xiaomi also confirmed that it has increased the hand’s lifespan to 150,000 threshold, as earlier versions began to fail and wear out after 10,000 repetitions.
By releasing data from its tactile and haptic testing as Open-Source, Xiaomi is further helping the broader robotics industry build better, more efficient robots. That includes 61 hours of raw tactile data and the TacRefineNet framework, a special robotics framework developed by the company.
All these signal to one thing: robots are poised to become significantly more capable, moving from mere commercial machines to precise systems that handle tasks with speed and advanced dexterity.
For more on where humanoid robotics is headed next, check out how Unitree is betting big on profitability and scale in its upcoming IPO.