AGILINK's OmniHand ran a 72-step test station in 8.5 minutes, 30 seconds behind a skilled worker

A dexterous hand from AGILINK ran a full 72-step job at a real workstation without anyone stepping in, and finished each round in 8.5 minutes, against 8 minutes for a skilled worker, the company said at AgiBot's Innovation Day in Shanghai on Oct. 29. The job was end-of-line testing: an OmniHand loaded another hand that was waiting to ship, scanned it, clamped it, drove its screws with a screw gun, started the test rig, took the screws back out and put the hand away. AGILINK, which split off from AgiBot nine months ago, says the proof of concept at its joint manufacturing base with Wolong in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, reached a 98% task success rate and can run for eight hours straight.

That puts the hand about 6% behind a person on cycle time, which takes speed off the table as the main objection to hands on a line. Over an eight-hour run, 8.5-minute rounds at 98% come to about 55 good tests; a worker at 8 minutes with no breaks would do 60. CEO Qiao Tianjie said deployments will now be judged on cycle time, success rate, stability and return on investment, and pitched hands at the 20% to 30% of complex steps that grippers, after decades of development, still cannot cover.

The hand recovered from a shifted arm; the customer was AGILINK

The case for the result is in how the hand coped. Engineers shifted the arm, misaligned the fixture holes and changed the lighting during the run, and the hand corrected using vision and touch, PEdaily and Yangcheng Pai reported; when a screw failed to seat, it backed out and tried again. AGILINK says reinforcement learning on the real robot made the hand two to three times faster than under teleoperation, and that its whole-hand failure rate has fallen from nearly 10% at first to under 0.5%.

The case against is the customer. The station tests AGILINK's own product at a base it runs with a partner, a job it could design around the hand. The outside test is Wolong Electric Drive's own dexterous-hand station, which is due to join its production line within the year, according to 36Kr. AGILINK says it has made more than 15,000 dexterous hands so far in 2026, which it puts at close to 80% of China's dexterous-hand shipments for all of 2025.

A glove to collect the touch data robots lack

AGILINK also launched OmniGlove Pro, a data-collection glove now in volume delivery. It records hand position, posture and touch at the same time, with 0.1 mm fingertip positioning and 746 tactile points at 3 mm spatial resolution, and its recordings have been replayed on real robots. "Today's large models are like a brain in a vat," said chief embodied scientist Huang Bidan, according to PEdaily: they have seen huge amounts of text, images and video but have never touched the physical world.

Qiao's picture of the end state is "one pair of hands assembling the next pair on the line." What ran in Shaoxing was a hand testing the next one.