The $6 Billion Chinese Startup Trying to Build Hands for Every Robot

If you could buy a humanoid robot for less than a smartphone, would you? Would you buy several robots to handle cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and even your job?

This is the pitch being made by Zhou Yong, the 40-year-old founder and chief technology officer of LinkerBot, one of China’s leading manufacturers of dexterous humanoid hands. The startup’s hardware comes complete with five fingers and at least 11 joints and is sold for as little as $600 in China. LinkerBot’s hands can play piano, thread needles, tighten screws, and assemble electronics. In three to five years, Zhou predicts, the price for one will fall to just $200. Eventually, “everyone will own ten robots on average,” Zhou said in an exclusive interview with WIRED.

Marketing spectacles like the humanoid robot marathonin Beijing have drawn attention to robots’ legs, but the real frontier in humanoids is hands. “The hands are the...

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