NEO Specs Explained: Tendon Drives, 22-DoF Hands and a Soft Body

Tendon drive vs. gearbox

Most robots move their joints with electric motors and rigid gear reductions. That gives precision but adds inertia — the joint resists being pushed, which is dangerous around people. NEO uses cable (tendon) drives: motors located in the torso pull on cables that move the limbs. Advantages: very low limb inertia, high back-drivability (95% claimed) and low noise (about 22 dB). Trade-offs: cables stretch and need calibration, which the manufacturer says is handled by continuous AI-based adaptation.

The hands

Each hand has 22 degrees of freedom — individually articulated fingers rather than a simple gripper. Combined with IP68 water resistance, that means NEO can theoretically wash dishes, wring a cloth or pick up small objects. Dexterity in demonstrations is promising but slower than a human's.

Strength numbers

• Lift 154 lb — a two-handed lift from the floor, e.g. a heavy box.
• Carry 55 lb — a bag of groceries or a full laundry basket.
• Arm payload 18 lb — a single-arm hold, e.g. a watering can.

Battery

An 842 Wh pack gives roughly 4 hours of active operation, and a quick charge adds about an hour of runtime per 6 minutes on the dock. Expect NEO to return to the dock between chores rather than run all day.

Sensing and compute

Two 8.85 MP stereo fisheye cameras at 90 Hz provide depth perception; four beamforming microphones handle voice. On-board compute is an NVIDIA Jetson Thor-class module rated up to 2070 FP4 TFLOPS — enough to run vision-language models locally rather than in the cloud.

Safety figures

HIC under 250, no external pinch points, lattice-polymer padding and a 66 lb body. These are the numbers that make a humanoid plausible in a home rather than a factory cage.