Shadow Dexterous Hand

A highly humanlike dexterous hand from the UK's Shadow Robot, with 24 joints and 20 actuated degrees of freedom.

The Shadow Dexterous Hand was developed by London-based Shadow Robot Company and is the company's flagship product. Designed to match the size and joint range of a human hand, it has 24 joints in total, 20 of which are independently actuated, with the rest coupled through underactuation. The electric version places its motors in the forearm and pulls the fingers via tendons, and includes extensive position and tactile sensing. It's expensive and complex to maintain, but has long served as the benchmark platform for dexterous-manipulation research, and many simulators include a built-in model of it. The company later partnered with Google DeepMind to produce a more durable hand, the DEX-EE.

ExampleOpenAI's Dactyl project trained a reinforcement-learning policy in simulation, then used it to solve a Rubik's Cube one-handed on a real Shadow Hand.

Also called

Shadow Hand

Related

Dexterous Hand · Shadow Robot Company · Dactyl · Tendon-Driven Actuation · DEX-EE (Shadow Robot × Google DeepMind) · In-hand Manipulation

Sources

Shadow Dexterous Hand Series - Shadow Robot
Shadow Hand - Wikipedia

As of

2026-09