A hand knows more than it can tell.
Aero UMI lets it show.
#IROS2026
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What if the answer to dexterous manipulation has been in the human hand all along?
Aero UMI and Aero Hand: 100% co-designed.
Same structure, same contact surfaces, same sense of touch.
IROS 2026, Booth 842, from Sept 28. We'll show you.
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Chestnut is coming to #WAIC2026
Real hands Real tasks Real applications
See our dexterous robotic hands in action.
📅 July 17–20, 2026 📍 Booth H3-A116
Shanghai World Expo Exhibition & Convention Center
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For real customers in real deployments, reliability is the spec that matters most — and one of the hardest problems in dexterous hands. It's what we've engineered for from day one.
Tendon-driven, every actuator sealed inside the palm: a hand built to survive millions of cycles on the test rig — and the accidental mishandling that real work inevitably brings.
Durability is the foundation. Our other core advantage is data — not more data, but higher-fidelity data, captured at sub-millimeter precision. Our co-founder & CTO Joe Dong walks @TheHumanoidHub through both ⬇️
See it live at #WAIC2026 next week.
We toured Chestnut Robotics in Shanghai and sat down with co-founder & CTO Joe Dong.
The Santa Clara, CA based startup has built a tendon-driven humanoid hand with all the actuators contained in the palm, weighing only about 400 grams.
We discussed the hand design, their 5-finger UMI data-collection platform and more.
Thanks @dolylupec for pitching in.
Thanks @JoeDong233873 and @ChestnutRobotic for the tour.
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We keep hearing the same thing: dexterous hands break. Usually by accident, and even experienced developers slip up sometimes.
So we tested its most fragile part, the fingers. Repeated impacts, harder each time.
Aero Hand Open held.
Reliability you can build on.
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Early in-house test. Task 1: Aero Hand Open grabs a handful of screws from one bin and drops them into another. Task 2: with a power screwdriver, it fastens a screw on another hand. 1x speed. Robot, hand, and policy are all ours.
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Chestnut Robotics retweeted
First SLAM navigation test of our wheeled humanoid , running through the office @ChestnutRobotic .
U-turn included, no human in the loop.
Wheels first. Hands next.
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That's our Aero Hand Open running in this active UMI rig. we kept it under 400g and packaged all the motors inside the palm so it mounts onto any wrist with no kinematic re-tuning. handheld setups like this were one of the use cases we built around. great to see it in this kind of build. @kukreja_abhinav ping us if you need any further support, dms open.
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High-quality dexterous robot data is expensive to scale.
That is the bottleneck we are focused on at Chestnut Robotics.
As our co-founder and CTO @JoeDong233873 puts it, our approach is to convert human dexterous manipulation data into robot-quality data, starting from structured industrial environments where robots can create real value first.
Inspired by Generalist AI’s new piece:
Robot learning should be more goal-driven, not model-driven.
World models and VLAs both matter. But today’s biggest bottleneck is still data — especially for dexterous manipulation.
The winner in robotics may not just have a better model.
It may have a better data engine.
open.substack.com/pub/joedon…
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Finger tutting looks easy until you try to engineer it. Every finger moves on its own axis. Every joint hits the beat. The palm holds steady through all of it.
So we built a hand that could.
Built to work. Also built to dance.
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Dexterous hands work great in controlled settings. We wanted to know what happens when the environment fights back.
So we let a toddler loose in the living room, then gave the Aero Hand Open one instruction: "put the toys back in the bin."
Fully autonomous from there. VLA model perceives the scene, plans each grasp in real time, adapts finger trajectories to objects it has never trained on. Stuffed animals, toy trucks, rattles, all soft and irregular, scattered randomly across a play mat.
No fixtures. No staging. Just a real room, real mess, real manipulation.
Fully open source.
#robotics #embodiedAI #opensource
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Chestnut Robotics retweeted
Sunday just raised $165M 🤖
This validates UMI-based in-the-wild data collection as THE winning strategy for robot manipulation.
But picking up objects is just the beginning.
Next frontier: dexterous manipulation
→ In-hand reorientation (rotating a pen, unscrewing a cap)
→ Tool use designed for human ergonomics (scissors, screwdrivers, knives)
→ Contact-rich bimanual coordination (tying knots, opening jars)
The hard part isn't the model architecture — it's capturing rich hand demonstration data at scale.
Whoever builds the best glove + multi-fingered hand capture pipeline wins.
Same UMI playbook. Much harder input space. 🦾
#robotics #dexteroushand #humanoid
We just raised $165M to end robotics demos and deploy the world's first autonomous home robots into households this year.
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We have some exciting news to share! 🚀 Today, TetherIA is officially rebranding to Chestnut Robotics. 🌰🤖 As our focus on advanced robotics has grown, we realized we needed an identity that truly reflects our vision for the future—sturdy, grounded, and innovative. Same dedicated team. Same core mission. Brand new look. Welcome to the next chapter. Let us know what you think of our new logo below! 👇 #ChestnutRobotics #Rebrand #Robotics
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1,000+ units shipped. Zero marketing spend.
Aero Hand Open is proving that in robotics, product speaks louder than ads.
Every hand you see here found its way to a lab, a factory, or a research team — purely by word of mouth.
This is just the beginning.
#DexterousHand #Robotics
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100% behind our CEO @Evan_Tao_T.We’re building the full stack to unlock real-world dexterous robotics, with official deployment coming in 2026.Follow us for every step of this journey.
#robotics #AI #buildinginpublic
I spent years at Tesla Optimus and Apple Vision Pro pushing the limits of hardware.
Here's what I learned: the bottleneck for real-world robots isn't just the hardware — it's the data and the model.
We are here to fix it.
This is what we're building: → A world action model for dexterous manipulation → A low-cost, high-quality in-the-wild data collection system
Goal: real-world deployment in 2026.
This is day one.
#robotics #manipulation #buildingInPublic
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