PHYBOT, an embodied AI robotics company, gave the first public showing of its PhyHand series of fully direct-drive anthropomorphic dexterous hands at the 140th China Import and Export Fair, better known as the Canton Fair, which opened in Guangzhou on October 15. The company also put its humanoid robots to work in public areas of the venue and showed a quadruped at its booth.
PhyHand has 23 active degrees of freedom and pairs direct drive with dual encoders. PHYBOT says this design keeps the hand from losing steps during high-frequency operation, avoids slack during fine adjustments and keeps force output stable. The whole hand weighs 750 grams, which the company says makes it easy to fit to different robot platforms. It describes PhyHand as an end effector aimed at industrial-grade fine manipulation.
For now its capabilities are limited. PHYBOT says the hand has completed full laboratory validation and can reproduce basic motions. At the booth it played rock-paper-scissors with visitors to show coordinated movement across its joints. The company says fine grasping and other practical skills are still being developed, along with multi-platform integration testing and refinement in real settings. It has not disclosed grip force, sensing details, pricing or availability.
Around the fairground, PHYBOT C series humanoids gave bilingual Chinese and English tours in the Canton Fair history exhibition hall and played badminton and table tennis with visitors, alongside boxing demonstrations. The company says a C series robot played badminton autonomously against people at the previous Canton Fair in the spring, and that the setup later ran at a Guangzhou shopping mall over the summer. Before the fair opened, PHYBOT signed a strategic cooperation agreement with sporting goods brand Double Fish. The two plan to build a robot sports interaction lab and work together on events and marketing.
At its booth, PHYBOT also showed the D series quadruped carrying sustained loads, including an inspection setup with a fire extinguisher and smoke detectors. The company pitches it for mine patrols, power inspection, chemical plant security and emergency response.
PHYBOT also makes the M series full-size humanoid and its own PhyArc joint modules. Its pitch at the fair was that its robots should do real jobs rather than just stand on display, though by its own account the dexterous hand has not reached that stage yet.
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