# ZWHAND

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/zwhand
> Updated: 2026-07-06
> Categories: Chinese AI, Robot Hardware, Robotics, Robotics Companies
> License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), the free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Reuse freely with attribution to "AI Wiki (aiwiki.ai)".

| ZWHAND | |
| --- | --- |
| Type | Dexterous-hand brand and subsidiary |
| Founded | 2023 |
| Parent company | Shenzhen Zhaowei Machinery and Electronics Co., Ltd. (SZSE: 003021; HKEX: 02692) |
| Headquarters | Bao'an District, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China |
| Products | B20, A17, B06 dexterous hands (also sold as the DM17 / DM20 / LM06 series) |
| Website | zwhand.com |

**ZWHAND** is the dexterous-hand brand and robotics subsidiary of Shenzhen Zhaowei Machinery and Electronics Co., Ltd. (兆威机电), a listed Chinese precision micro-transmission and micro-motor manufacturer. Registered as Shenzhen Zhaowei Dexterous Hand Technology Co., Ltd. (深圳市兆威灵巧手技术有限公司) and founded in 2023, ZWHAND builds five-finger robotic hands that package all of their motors, gearboxes, sensors and control electronics inside the palm. [1][2][3] The company made its global debut at [CES](/wiki/consumer_electronics_show) 2026 in January 2026 with a three-model lineup, the 20-DOF B20 flagship, the 17-DOF A17 workhorse and the low-cost 6-DOF B06, positioning itself to make high-precision [dexterous hands](/wiki/dexterous_hand) cheap enough for mass-market [embodied AI](/wiki/embodied_ai). [1][4][5] What distinguishes ZWHAND from most rivals is its parentage: rather than a pure-play startup, it is the downstream integration arm of an established maker of micro motors, precision gears and lead screws, which lets it manufacture the core drive components of a hand in-house. [6][7]

## Parent company: Zhaowei and its micro-drive heritage

Shenzhen Zhaowei Machinery and Electronics was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in the Bao'an District of Shenzhen. [8][9] For more than two decades its core business has been integrated micro-transmission and micro-drive systems: tiny motors, planetary and other precision gearboxes, lead screws, and injection-molded precision parts sold into automotive electronics, smartphones and consumer electronics, medical devices, communications equipment, smart home and personal-care appliances, VR headsets (inter-pupillary-distance adjustment mechanisms), and, more recently, [robotics](/wiki/robotics). [6][9][10] The company describes itself, citing Frost and Sullivan data in its 2026 Hong Kong prospectus, as China's largest integrated micro-transmission and drive system supplier, with a 3.9 percent domestic share and a fourth-place global ranking (about 1.4 percent) by 2024 revenue. [11]

Zhaowei is dual-listed. Its A-shares floated on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (ticker 003021) on 4 December 2020 at an offer price of 75.12 yuan. [12] In 2026 it added a Hong Kong listing: it cleared the Hong Kong Exchanges hearing on 30 January 2026 and began trading on the HKEX main board on 9 March 2026 under the code 02692, pricing its H-shares at HK$71.28 and raising net proceeds of roughly HK$1.83 billion, with Hillhouse and Mirae Asset among the cornerstone investors. [11][13][14] For the 2025 financial year Zhaowei reported revenue of about RMB 1.72 billion (up 12.5 percent year on year) and net profit attributable to shareholders of RMB 254 million (up 13.0 percent), on research and development spending of RMB 174 million, roughly 10 percent of revenue, and a workforce of which 522 were R&D staff. [15][16]

That heritage is the whole point of ZWHAND. A dexterous hand is, mechanically, a dense cluster of tiny actuators: the hardest parts to build well are the sub-centimeter motors, the micro reducers and the transmission elements, exactly what Zhaowei has spent twenty years making. The company has publicly cited milestones such as a 3.4 mm-diameter gearbox developed in 2015 and more than 450 granted intellectual-property rights. [3] By spinning up ZWHAND in 2023, Zhaowei moved from selling components to upstream customers toward building and selling a finished [humanoid-robot](/wiki/humanoid_robot) end-effector itself, a vertical-integration bet that its own motors and gears can make an anthropomorphic hand both precise and, crucially, mass-producible. [6][7][11]

## Product lineup

ZWHAND unveiled its first self-developed dexterous hand in November 2024 at the 26th China Hi-Tech Fair in Shenzhen: a 17-DOF hand using a proprietary single-joint drive scheme, with each finger carrying at least three degrees of freedom. [17][18] Around July 2025 it released commercial versions under engineering names (the 17-motor DM17, the 20-motor DM20 and the 6-motor LM06), and by CES 2026 it had consolidated the range into a three-tier consumer-facing lineup: B20, A17 and B06. [4][5][19] The company is precise about the distinction between active degrees of freedom (independently driven joints) and passive or coupled joints; on the direct-drive models the number of active [degrees of freedom](/wiki/degrees_of_freedom) equals the number of motors, one motor per joint. [5][20]

| Model | Active DOF | Motors | Weight | Palm size (L x W x H) | Fingertip / grasp force | Tactile e-skin | Drive |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| B20 (flagship) | 20 | 20 | about 600 g | 195 x 85 x 37 mm | about 15 N fingertip; about 5 kg whole-hand grasp | Yes (force resolution about +/-0.1 N) | Joint-integrated direct drive |
| A17 (workhorse) | 17 | 17 | about 850 g | about 244 x 94 mm | not published | Yes | Joint-integrated direct drive |
| B06 (entry) | 6 active (plus coupled passive joints) | 6 | about 400 g | about 176 x 84 mm | high whole-hand grip (roughly 17 to 20 kg reported) | Yes | Fingertip linkage |
| DM17 (2025 commercial) | 17 | 17 | about 1,000 g (with wrist flange) | not published | 30 N whole-hand; 5 to 12 N fingertip | Optional | Coreless motor plus lead screw |

Sources for the table: ZWHAND materials and the CES 2026 press release for the B20, A17 and B06; NE Times trade reporting for the A17 and B06 figures; and a US reseller listing for the DM17. [4][5][19][20] The A17 weight and dimensions come from Chinese trade reporting rather than an official English spec sheet, so they should be treated as approximate. [20]

The **B20** is the flagship. Its headline feature is form factor: at roughly 600 g and 195 x 85 x 37 mm it is sized to an adult male palm, so it can bolt onto a service or humanoid robot without the bulk that usually accompanies 20-DOF hands. [1][4] The company says all 20 joints, each driven by its own motor, plus position sensors, force sensors and the control board sit inside the palm and fingers, and that the hand can open and close in under 0.7 seconds. [5][20] ZWHAND markets the B20 for high-end humanoids, specialized industrial arms and research, and set a price of up to about US$7,000. [1][4]

The **A17** is pitched as the cost-efficient workhorse: 17 active DOF aimed at industrial sorting, logistics picking and service-robot interaction, where the extra three fingers-worth of dexterity in the B20 are not needed. [1][4] It corresponds to Zhaowei's original 2024 hand design and adds integrated tactile sensing. [18][20]

The **B06** (also listed in some Chinese materials as A06) is the accessibility play: a 6-DOF hand that uses a linkage transmission at the fingertips to deliver strong, simple grasping, priced at US$699 in mass production for STEM education, developer communities and basic automation. [1][4] Because it is underactuated (six motors moving more than six joints through coupled linkages), it trades fine independent finger control for low cost and high grip. [4][20]

Note on pricing: the newer B20 flagship (up to about US$7,000) is actually cheaper than the earlier DM17, which a US reseller listed at US$9,980 and one robotics catalog priced around US$12,500, illustrating the cost-reduction the company is claiming as it scales. [19][21]

## Technology

ZWHAND's central design idea is what the company calls a joint-embedded full power unit (关节内置全动力单元): instead of placing motors in the forearm and routing tendons or cables to the fingers, each finger joint contains its own complete actuation package. [5][20] That package integrates a brushless coreless (hollow-cup) micro-motor, roughly 8 to 10 mm in diameter, a matched precision planetary reducer (the B20 uses an 8 mm micro planetary reducer), a magnetic encoder for position feedback, and control electronics, with a flexible electronic skin over the fingertips and surface. [5][17][22] A single multi-layer control board coordinates all of the motors through what Zhaowei describes as a 1+N topology, keeping the whole system inside the hand. [17]

The company frames this as a full direct-drive architecture (全直驱), meaning each joint is actuated locally rather than remotely through [tendon-driven](/wiki/tendon_driven) cables, and it claims the approach improves transmission efficiency by more than 30 percent versus its earlier designs. [5][20] A precision point worth flagging: some vendor and industry descriptions loosely call the actuator a linear motor, and Zhaowei's earlier hands did use lead or ball screws to convert a rotary motor's spin into linear finger motion. The underlying device, though, is a rotary brushless coreless motor coupled to a micro reducer (and, in the screw-based generations, a lead screw), not a true ironless linear motor. Readers should treat linear motor and direct drive here as marketing shorthand for a joint-integrated rotary actuator. [3][5][19]

For sensing, the fingertips and palm surface carry a flexible e-skin that the company says provides [tactile sensing](/wiki/tactile_sensing) of pressure, with the B20 quoted at roughly +/-0.1 N force resolution, feeding compliant-grasp and force-feedback control for delicate [manipulation](/wiki/robot_manipulation). [5][20] Zhaowei also cites durability figures of a 10,000-hour service life and more than one million motion cycles, and analysts have noted a claimed 10-year design life on the DM17, longer than the roughly 5-year figure common in the segment; these are company and analyst figures rather than independently verified test results. [2][15][17] The broader pitch is that Zhaowei's in-house motors, gears and screws let ZWHAND hit high precision at a price that supports volume production, its stated goal of democratizing dexterity for [physical AI](/wiki/physical_ai). [1][6]

## CES 2026 debut

ZWHAND presented its lineup as a global launch at CES 2026, which opened on 6 January 2026 in Las Vegas, at booth N1.8153, under a product theme rendered in English as "Full Spectrum, New Era." [1][7][23] The booth showcased what Zhaowei called a micro-transmission plus dexterous-hand ecosystem: the B20, A17 and B06 hands alongside the servo motors, drum motors and micro-transmission modules that go inside them, plus the company's VR inter-pupillary-distance adjustment systems. [7][23] Press coverage led with the 20-DOF B20 as evidence that Chinese suppliers were moving from prototype demonstrations toward commercial-scale, mass-producible dexterous hands, with Chinese outlets branding the debut as a coming-out for a domestic "China hand." [7][23] Zhaowei reported that the showing drew significant international interest and yielded initial cooperation intentions with several overseas humanoid-robot companies, a company claim that had not been converted into disclosed, named contracts as of mid-2026. [7]

The 2026 debut built on a prior CES appearance. At CES 2025, the parent company (as ZHAOWEI) had already shown a dexterous hand described as offering 17 to 20 degrees of freedom, drawing booth visits from senior representatives of Samsung, Apple, Amazon, TCL, Sony and Fujifilm, and it had earlier set up a US subsidiary, ZW Drive Inc., in mid-2024 to support overseas expansion. [24]

## Market position and competitors

Chinese analysts group the dexterous-hand industry into upstream component makers, specialized hand developers, and humanoid-robot integrators building proprietary hands. [25] ZWHAND is unusual because it spans two of those layers: in the industry-chain infographics that circulated in 2025 and 2026 it appears as a downstream hand integrator (labeled "ZW HAND"), yet it is owned by an upstream specialist in the very motors, gears and screws that everyone else must buy. [25] That vertical integration, plus the parent's manufacturing scale, is the foundation of ZWHAND's central claim: parameters that rival international hands at a cost closer to domestic components. [7][11] The trade-off is that Zhaowei is a newer entrant to finished hands, and Chinese competitive rankings place it in a second tier alongside integrators such as [Unitree](/wiki/unitree) and [AgiBot](/wiki/agibot), behind first-tier specialists like Linker Hand, Inspire and [PaXini](/wiki/paxini_technology). [25]

The industry has settled into three broad transmission routes, and ZWHAND deliberately covers two of them (direct drive for the B20 and A17, linkage for the B06). [5][25]

| Maker | Representative hand | Drive route | Notable spec | Positioning |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| ZWHAND (Zhaowei) | B20 | Joint-integrated direct drive (plus linkage on B06) | 20 active DOF, about 600 g | Component maker integrating downstream; precision at volume price |
| [Wuji Hand](/wiki/wuji_hand) | Wuji Hand 2 | Full direct drive | 20 active DOF, about 580 g, 5 kg pinch / 20 kg power grip | Rugged, calibration-light direct drive |
| [Inspire Robots](/wiki/inspire_robotics) | RH-series hands | Linkage (underactuated) | lower DOF, simple and low cost | Early mover; cost-sensitive industrial grippers |
| [Xynova](/wiki/xynova) | [Flex 1](/wiki/xynova_flex_1) / Flex 2 | Tendon-driven, moving to tendon-plus-direct hybrid | 23 to 25 DOF, about 380 g, lifts 30 kg+ | Lightweight, high-DOF, high force-to-weight |
| [Linker Hand](/wiki/linkerbot) | Linker Hand series | Tendon-driven | up to 42 DOF; reported 80 percent+ share of high-DOF hands | High-DOF research and premium volume |

Sources: ZWHAND and Zhaowei materials for the B20; competitor vendor and press figures for Wuji, Inspire, Xynova and Linker Hand. [5][20][25][26][27] The takeaway is a clear division of labor: direct-drive designs (Wuji, ZWHAND's B20) chase precision and robustness with actuators embedded at each joint; linkage designs (Inspire, ZWHAND's B06) chase low cost; and tendon-driven designs (Xynova, Linker Hand) chase high degree-of-freedom counts and force-to-weight, at the cost of more complex cable routing and calibration. [25]

On market size, forecasts vary widely and should be read with caution; no single dexterous-hand growth rate is settled, and at least one figure circulating in industry infographics (a "72.38 percent CAGR") does not trace to any reputable market report. A defensible, attributable data point comes from Zhaowei's own Hong Kong prospectus, which cites Frost and Sullivan projecting China's integrated micro-transmission market (the broader category, not dexterous hands alone) to grow from about RMB 33.2 billion in 2024 to RMB 72.6 billion in 2029, a 17.3 percent compound annual growth rate. [11] Separately, Zhaowei disclosed that its embodied-intelligence-related revenue rose 281 percent year on year in the first three quarters of 2025, a company figure that signals momentum without settling the size of the market. [13] The broader context is the rapid 2025 to 2026 expansion of the [humanoid-robot market](/wiki/humanoid_robot_market) and China's push in physical AI, which is where ZWHAND, and the wider Chinese dexterous-hand cluster it belongs to, is placing its bet. [7][25]

## ELI5

Robots are getting good at walking and seeing, but hands are still the hard part, because a human hand has lots of tiny moving joints packed into a small space. ZWHAND makes robot hands the size of a real hand that hide all their little motors, gears and sensors inside the palm, so the fingers can move on their own and even feel how hard they are squeezing. The company that owns ZWHAND, called Zhaowei, has spent more than twenty years making the tiny motors and gears that go inside things like car parts, phones and VR headsets, so it already knew how to build the trickiest pieces. That is why ZWHAND thinks it can make good robot hands that are also cheap enough for lots of robots, from a US$699 starter hand for students up to a US$7,000 top model with 20 moving joints.

## See also

- [Dexterous hand](/wiki/dexterous_hand)
- [Tactile sensing](/wiki/tactile_sensing)
- [Humanoid robot](/wiki/humanoid_robot)
- [Embodied AI](/wiki/embodied_ai)
- [Xynova](/wiki/xynova)
- [Inspire Robots](/wiki/inspire_robotics)
- [Linker Hand](/wiki/linkerbot)
- [Wuji Hand](/wiki/wuji_hand)
- [PaXini Technology](/wiki/paxini_technology)
- [Degrees of freedom](/wiki/degrees_of_freedom)

## References

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2. ZWHAND official product site (English), zwhand.com. https://www.zwhand.com/en
3. ZWHAND, "About Us" (深圳市兆威灵巧手技术有限公司). https://www.zwhand.com/about
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26. "Wuji Hand 2," Wuji Technology (official). https://wuji.tech/en/hand2
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