The creepiest robot just got hands

PLUS: Hugging Face's robotics lead now has a stealth startup

AuthorAuthor

Jennifer Mossalgue & Rowan Cheung
December 01, 2025

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Clone Robotics just made a hand that’s almost too human. Sinewy artificial muscles, carbon-fiber bones, and a tangle of sensors let it move with freaky precision — and survive half a million cycles.

It’s the perfect hand for the startup’s infamous humanoid, already dubbed “the world’s creepiest robot.”

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Lifelike robotic hand mimics human grip

  • Hugging Face’s robotics lead launches startup

  • China sounds alarm on humanoid bubble

  • Robots rebuild Pompeii’s shattered frescoes

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

CLONE ROBOTICS

Image source: Clone Robotics

The Rundown: U.S.-Polish startup Clone Robotics just dropped a new demo of its updated anthropomorphic robot hand, which the company claims now has human-level grip, precision, and speed.

The details:

  • With 27 degrees of freedom, the hand uses 70 inertial sensors and pressure pads to track angle, speed, and grip force in real time.

  • Controlled by the company’s Neural Joint V2 Controller and a sensor glove, the hand mirrors human finger movements with near-zero latency.

  • The company says the hand’s carbon fiber bones, ligament-style tethers, and hydraulic artificial muscles have endured over 650K cycles without fatigue.

  • Posting on X, Clone Robotics says building a fully actuated, human-level robotic hand is hard, but making it durable is “even more challenging.”

Why it matters: Clone’s biomimetic hand powers its Alpha humanoid — with just 279 units planned — which swaps rigid actuators for water-driven artificial muscles. If soft hydraulics scale, humanoids can escape mechanical stiffness for something much more humanlike. Whether we can handle the creep factor is another question.

HUGGING FACE

Image source: LinkedIn

The Rundown: Europe’s humanoid race just got a fresh Parisian entrant. UMA, a stealthy new startup founded by Hugging Face’s top roboticist Rémi Cadene, is quietly assembling a founding team to build general-purpose humanoids in the French capital.

The details:

  • Job posts call for “stylized” humanoid walking, reinforcement learning, foundation models, and human teleoperators feeding data back into the loop.

  • The ads sketch a full humanoid stack: whole-body mechatronics, distributed real-time firmware, and robotics roles focused on shipping complete systems.

  • The founding team is being assembled by Cadene, the robotics lead at Hugging Face, and a former Meta/Tesla robotics researcher.

  • This summer, UMA was reportedly in talks to raise roughly $40M in seed funding, signaling serious investor interest behind the stealth project.

Why it matters: UMA is stepping directly into Europe’s suddenly crowded humanoid arena — joining Germany’s Agile Robots and Neura Robotics, the UK’s Humanoid, and France’s Wandercraft. The difference this time: the hardware looks to be architected from day one as a platform for large-scale, end-to-end AI.

CHINESE ROBOTICS

Image source: Unitree

The Rundown: China’s top economic planner just slapped a warning label on the country’s humanoid boom, saying a froth of more than 150 near-identical robot makers is starting to look like a bubble, not a revolution, Bloomberg reports.

The details:

  • Officials say more than 150 firms are now cranking out lookalike bots, risking a flood of copycat machines that soak up capital and cut off real R&D.

  • The sector has been turbocharged by viral stunts from startups like Unitree and is officially recognized by Beijing as a growth engine.

  • Humanoid stocks have surged, with the Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index up nearly 30% in 2025, but real-world adoption remains years away.

  • Chinese regulators plan to tighten market entry, promote consolidation, and steer resources into core tech and training infrastructure to prevent collapse.

Why it matters: China’s warning shows that even the world’s biggest robotics ecosystem is worried its humanoid boom is drifting into bubble territory, echoing past tech frenzies that ended in tough shakeouts. If regulators move to cool the sector, it could reshape the global humanoid race just as competition seriously ramps up.

ROBOTS FOR GOOD

Image source: RePAIR

The Rundown: Robots are piecing together Pompeii's shattered frescoes — one fragment at a time. The RePAIR project deploys machine vision and pattern-matching algorithms to reassemble thousands of broken artifacts gathering dust in storerooms.

The details:

  • The system scans and digitizes fragments, then uses AI to detect subtle patterns that human eyes miss across thousands of pieces.

  • Robotic arms handle the delicate reassembly work that once took conservators years to complete manually.

  • Installed at Pompeii’s Casina Rustica, the robot has already restored frescoes from the House of the Painters at Work and the gladiators’ training hall.

  • The system is designed to augment, not replace, human experts — handling the puzzle work so archaeologists can focus on higher-level interpretation.

Why it matters: RePAIR represents a rare leap from digital to physical. While major museums use AI for restoration, few systems actually reassemble physical fragments robotically. If RePAIR proves scalable beyond Pompeii's frescoes to mosaics, pottery, and statues, it could unlock millions of artifacts gathering dust in museum storerooms.

QUICK HITS

Sunday Robotics hired at least 10 former Tesla employees — including veterans of the Optimus and Autopilot teams — to help launch its Memo home robot.

A wave of Bay Area startups and big-tech skunkworks are reportedly pivoting away from humanoids toward “Pixar-like” robots: compact, expressive bots on wheels.

Surgical robotics, already a multibillion-dollar market globally, will nearly double by 2029, according to a new MassDevice intelligence report.

Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun says the company plans to deploy humanoids throughout its factories within five years, leveraging AI-powered automation to boost efficiency.

Flexion Robotics dropped a demo of its modular “brain” software in a humanoid that autonomously navigates rough outdoor terrain, detects trash, and cleans it up.

A 16-year-old from Bristol, UK, spent two years designing and building a fully functional robotic hand out of Lego pieces.

UBTech Robotics landed a multimillion-dollar deal to deploy its Walker humanoid in a trial at Chinese border crossings to manage crowds and guide travelers.

Chinese firm Deep Robotics staged a rescue drill to showcase how its X30 robot dogs can operate in hazardous environments and assist with disaster response.

Australia’s marine science agency is testing AI-guided robot boats that scan the seafloor and drop baby corals on ceramic carriers to help restore the Great Barrier Reef.

More than 800 Chicago residents signed a petition urging the city to pause its sidewalk delivery robot pilot until officials release safety and ADA data.

The ARM Institute signed a five-year cooperative agreement with the Air Force Research Laboratory worth up to $87M to conduct R&D.

Two Lisbon teens built a six‑legged AI reforestation robot that climbs burned slopes, analyzes soil, and plants saplings in one of Europe’s most wildfire‑scarred countries.

Elon Musk now says Tesla will “roughly double” its supervised Robotaxi fleet in Austin to about 60 cars next month, far short of his pledge to hit 500 vehicles by year-end.

COMMUNITY

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Rowan, Jennifer, and Joey—The Rundown’s editorial team