Muscle V0

Daxo Robotics takes redundancy to an extreme with the Muscle V0: instead of a handful of motors and rigid joints, this soft, tendon-driven prototype packs 108 small linear actuators that act as artificial muscles, twenty for each of its five fingers. Founder Tom Zhang presented the working prototype in July 2025 and speaks of infinite degrees of freedom, a marketing phrase rather than a specification.

No weight, payload, grip force or tactile sensing has been published, and the company website is little more than a business card with an e-mail address. A July 2025 article put the build cost of the prototype at roughly USD 1,200, but the hand is not on sale; price on request. For now the design is a research vehicle for highly over-actuated grasping.

Another young US company pursuing artificial muscles is Kyber Labs Hand, which relies on electromagnetic fibres in antagonistic pairs rather than dozens of individual actuators.