Truly dexterous manipulation

Joined September 2025
26 Photos and videos
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.
Insane month of R&D. On to the next ☺️
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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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Respect, Remi! Seeing you push our hand to its limits is exactly why we built it. Let’s skip the small talk and dive into co-creation. What’s your next wild move? We’d love to team up and build something truly insane together. 🦾🔥
I have one, it's a super cool and affordable 6DoFs hand :)
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We spilled grapes and blueberries all over the desk… so the robotic hand had to clean it up 🍇🫐🤖 Small, slippery objects are a real dexterity challenge — but the tendon-driven hand picks them up one by one under webcam-based teleoperation. What should we try next? Drop your ideas 👇 💻 GitHub: tetheria.github.io/aero-hand… 🧩 CAD: cad.onshape.com/documents/af… 🔗 Shop: shop.tetheria.ai/ #robotics #dexteroushand #manipulation #teleoperation #AI #embodiedAI #opensource #robotichand #finemanipulation #grasping
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Chestnut Robotics retweeted
🚀 Big news! We just received two Aero Open Hands from @TetherIA_ai ! 🤖👐 Get ready—new hand-based benchmarks are coming soon to RoboChallenge. Can't wait to put these to the test! Stay tuned. 👀
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Teleoperated precision test 🤖🃏 Our robotic hand picked the top card from a deck — and placed it back cleanly. Fine grasping, controlled release, and stable motion… all through real-time teleoperation. 💻 GitHub: tetheria.github.io/aero-hand… 🧩 CAD (Onshape): cad.onshape.com/documents/af… 🔗 Shop: shop.tetheria.ai/ #robotics #AI #teleoperation #dexteroushand #manipulation #opensource
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Pick-and-place teleoperation — cleaning up a messy desk, one object at a time 🤖🧹 Small items, large items, precise placement into a box. Our tendon-driven robotic hand adapts to different shapes with stable grasps and smooth release. What should we organize next? Drop your ideas 👇 💻 GitHub: tetheria.github.io/aero-hand… 🧩 CAD: cad.onshape.com/documents/af… 🔗 Shop: shop.tetheria.ai/ #robotics #AI #opensource #teleoperation #dexteroushand #manipulation #embodiedAI
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Building a cup tower with a tendon-driven robotic hand ☕🤖 Stable grasping, precise placement, controlled release — three layers up. What else do you want to see our hand try next? Drop your ideas in the comments 👇 🧩 CAD: cad.onshape.com/documents/af… 💻 GitHub: tetheria.github.io/aero-hand… 🔗 Shop: shop.tetheria.ai/ #robotics #AI #opensource #dexteroushand #manipulation #embodiedAI
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We ran a grasp endurance test on our open source dexterous hand 🦆🤖 This clip shows the first 10,000 cycles from a 72-hour test (250×). Throughout the run, the system stayed stable with no mechanical failures. The motor’s thermal protection triggered twice — a normal safeguard that automatically recovers and keeps the test going. 🧩 CAD (Onshape): cad.onshape.com/documents/af… 💻 GitHub: tetheria.github.io/aero-hand… 🔗 Shop: shop.tetheria.ai/ #robotics #AI #opensource #hardware #enduranceTest #dexteroushand
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After extensive endurance testing, our tendon-driven dexterous hand kept performing flawlessly 🤖⚙️ Built for durability. Designed for research. And now — the CAD is fully open-source. 🧩 CAD (Onshape): cad.onshape.com/documents/af… 💻 GitHub: tetheria.github.io/aero-hand… 🔗 Shop: shop.tetheria.ai/ #robotics #AI #opensource #hardware #dexteroushand #enduranceTest
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We built a high-fidelity, cable-driven robotic hand in MuJoCo — accurately reproducing the full internal tendon system 🤖🧩 It’s now officially part of the MuJoCo Menagerie. On top of it, we developed a zero-shot RL training & real-world deployment pipeline based on MuJoCo Playground. Here’s a demo of Z-axis rotation, powered by tendon actuation ⚙️👇 💻 GitHub: tetheria.github.io/aero-hand… 🔗 Learn more: shop.tetheria.ai/ #robotics #AI #reinforcementlearning #mujoco #opensource #sim2real #dexteroushand
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