How Shenzhen actually works, a ground-level primer with Seeed Studio founder Eric Pan

In this episode, I speak with Scott Walter, PhD, Robotics Research Diligence Director at RoboStrategy. We started with Tesla and Figure’s opposing experiences with tendon-driven humanoid hands, then spent more than an hour pulling apart what a robotic hand actually needs to do. Scott is a mechanical and aerospace engineer, a 2-time robotics founder, and one of the sharpest public readers of humanoid-hand architecture. He has worked through Tesla’s hand iterations, Figure’s decision to abandon its first tendon-driven design, 1X’s routing choices, and the direct-drive approaches behind Wuji and Sharpa Wave. This was a particularly fun and wide-ranging conversation. We used three extreme designs to escape the usual tendon-versus-motor argument: Allonic’s braided structure, Daxo’s maximalist system with up to 120 tendons, and Tacta’s hydraulic hand, glove, sensing, and data stack. Tacta is especially interesting because it is designed as a complete manipulation system for cobots and industrial arms, without trying to fit inside a humanoid. The side paths were just as useful. Scott proposed a decathlon for humanoids, complete with pole vault, hurdles, baton exchange, and the same sand pit humans use. We also asked whether robots should copy human movement at all, and whether a general-purpose body still becomes specialized through its profession, as humans do. In this episode we cover: * Why Tesla and Figure reached different conclusions about tendons * What Bowden tubes solve, and what they add at the wrist * Why joint count and independent control are different metrics * What the Humanoid Games reveal about robot-specific movement * Scott’s proposal for a humanoid decathlon * What Allonic, Daxo, and Tacta teach at the design extremes * Why Tacta is building a manipulation system outside the humanoid * How generalized bodies can still become specialized workers Scott Walter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-walter-ph-d-b2a78ab/ RoboStrategy: https://robostrategy.co/ Watch on YouTube: [YouTube URL] Every episode, I sit down with the founders, researchers, and operators building physical AI worldwide, tracing the full stack from components and supply chains to what actually deploys. See all published episodes here. Chapters 00:00 Cold open: the labor prize and the 5-year forecast 00:24 The Fermi paradox of robotic hands 01:18 Tesla, Figure and the tendon debate 05:10 Bowden tubes and routing tendons through a wrist 11:15 Joints, actuators and real degrees of control 14:38 Why the pinky matters more than it looks 17:23 Humanoid Games as real-world robotics experiments 21:57 Scott’s humanoid decathlon challenge 26:28 Tesla’s hand iterations and abandoned designs 27:55 Wuji and Sharpa Wave put motors in the fingers 38:29 What 3 extreme hand designs can teach us 38:53 Allonic’s braided hand and portfolio disclosure 51:15 Daxo’s maximalist hand with up to 120 tendons 01:02:36 Tacta measures how workers use their fingers 01:05:18 A robotic-hand system designed outside the humanoid 01:13:12 Data-center cables as a tactile manipulation task 01:16:22 General-purpose bodies and specialized work 01:19:18 Why this 5-year robotics forecast may be different Below is the full transcript. There may be errors as it’s AI-transcribed. 00:00:00 — Cold open — excerpt montage Scott Walter · 00:00:00 That is the biggest pie we’ve ever seen, ever, trying to automate labor. And sim-to-real gap is almost zero. So locomotion is a solved problem. Humanoids will be deployed like five years after everyone stops laughing. And they’re the worst they’re ever going to be. They’re just going to get better and better and better. 00:00:23 — Why dexterous robot hands are still hard Scott Walter · 00:00:23 And what I call the Fermi paradox of robotic hands. If they exist, where are they? And that’s always been the problem: you see them in the labs and then you go around and you’re like: I’m not seeing them anywhere. No one’s able to do them. And the question is: why is

Prensilia says its Mia hand survived 300,000 grasp cycles at full grip force in company testing, closing in 280 milliseconds. Francesco Clemente, Managing Director of Prensilia, walks through why fingers fail before motors and gears do, why the company left tendon-driven transmissions for rigid linkages, and how it prices a 3-motor hand against lower-cost competitors. The company puts its Mia hand at $10,000 to $15,000 and its bill of materials at roughly 35% motors and close to 70% mechanical transmission and frames, by its own count. What we cover * Why fingers break before motors or gears in a robotic hand * The move from tendon-driven transmission to rigid linkages in Prensilia’s product line * A 300,000-cycle grip force test protocol and what it does not tell you * Underactuation, degrees of freedom, and degrees of actuation explained * Bill of materials breakdown for a 3-motor dexterous hand * Customer mix across research, prosthetics, and industrial buyers * Manufacturing scale from hundreds of units a year toward volume production “Fingers are the parts that break the most, because you have impacts with objects, you have unexpected movements from the robot.” — Francesco Clemente, Managing Director, Prensilia “We are talking about thousands of cycles, not really millions of cycles, with the tendons.” — Francesco Clemente, Managing Director, Prensilia “The motors account for maybe thirty five percent, more or less, of the total cost.” — Francesco Clemente, Managing Director, PrensiliaFrancesco Clemente on LinkedInPrensilia WebsiteWatch on YouTube Every episode, I sit down with the founders, researchers, and operators building physical AI worldwide, tracing the full stack from components and supply chains to what actually deploys. See all published episodes hereChapters00:00 Francesco Clemente, Managing Director, Prensilia02:22 Prosthetics and research customers04:46 Broken hands and reliability07:09 Loaded versus unloaded cycle testing11:59 Failure modes in fingers, gears, and motors14:19 Motor heating and cooling16:42 Tendon maintenance and anchoring21:26 Weight and robotic-arm payload23:48 Degrees of freedom and actuation26:14 Underactuation and adaptive grasping31:01 Motor current, torque, and heat33:29 Grasp taxonomies and motor count35:52 Abduction and hand design38:17 Tactile sensing40:38 Bill of materials and actuators45:22 Industrial use cases50:04 Competitors and grippers54:42 Manufacturing scaleCore Matter is an independent research practice covering the physical AI value chain Michelle Sun: Fingers are the parts that break the most. And that connection is a weak point that is gonna break. The motors are bottlenecked, and having a lot of motors inside of a small volume, it’s easy to look at spec sheets, but you have to understand that Francesco Clemente, managing director of Prensilia. Prensilia builds robotic hands out of Pisa, Italy. It’s fun out of set and in a school of Advanced Studies in 2009. Started off in prosthetics, today their hands are on humanoid robots, factory arms, and human wrists. Prensilia’s Mia hand runs three motors, closes in 280 milliseconds, which is faster than a human hand, and has survived 300,000 cycles at full grip force in testing. It sells for $10,000 to $15,000 compared to the Chinese hands at 5k. On the spec sheets, the Mia hand might look overpriced and under threat. What they’re seeing in order volume says something different. Today we’ll talk about what’s on the ground in the dexterous hand markets. Francesco, welcome to the show. Prensilia is 17 years old today from 2009, and you are a spin off from Sant’Anna, started way before robot hands were cool, and definitely before the humanoid boom. So what did the company look like in 2009 and who paid the bills before humanoids existed as customers? Francesco Clemente: Yes, thank you very much for having me today. I’m very excited to be here. The company, Prensilia, was founded, as you said, by researchers of the artificial enzy

In this episode, I speak with Danny Bernstein, CEO of Reservoir. American farms advertised more than 400,000 seasonal positions in 2025 and received 182 domestic applications. That number sits underneath every agricultural robotics company raising money today.Danny spent close to 20 years in Silicon Valley. He was part of a startup that sold to Google, spent ten years at Google, and two years at Microsoft, before turning to the question of why the physical world has so few technical communities around it.Reservoir runs Reservoir Farms, 40 acres of working commercial farmland in Salinas where robotics startups test machines on real crops. It opened in March 2026, followed a month later by a second site in Sonoma County carrying 15 acres of Pinot grapes. Monterey County filed $4.82 billion in gross agricultural production value for 2025, and the farm sits within driving distance of Driscoll's, Taylor Farms and Dole Vegetables. In this episode we cover: * Why fresh produce still has no automated harvester * The labor math underneath agricultural robotics * Physics that replaces chemicals, and vision that reduces them * What actually breaks a machine in a field * The two-year payback every agricultural machine has to clear * Who manufactures and services these machines * Turning farm jobs into ag tech jobs Danny Bernstein on LinkedInReservoir Farms WebsiteWatch on YouTube Every episode, I sit down with the founders, researchers, and operators building physical AI worldwide, tracing the full stack from components and supply chains to what actually deploys. See all published episodes here.Chapters * 00:49 Danny Bernstein, Reservoir, and a technical community for agriculture * 00:49 Silicon Valley builds seven of everything, agriculture waits for one * 03:15 Driscoll’s, Taylor Farms, Dole, and a $4.8 billion county * 05:29 Not AI for luxury, and the three gaps worth building into * 05:29 Precision surgery by robot, fruit picked by hand * 07:50 400,000 advertised farm jobs and 182 domestic applicants * 10:11 What actually breaks a machine in a field * 12:36 Sonoma, and the plan to cover the top ten specialty crops * 12:36 Washington, tree fruit, and the Cosmic Crisp patent * 14:58 Two years to return the cost of the machine * 17:14 Service teams, dealers, and Andros Engineering * 21:50 Merced College, and building on a teaching farm * 24:12 YC gives you tokens, Reservoir gives you a tracto We are performing precision surgeries using robots, but we still hand harvest fruit. And there were over four hundred thousand of these jobs that were posted in twenty twenty five and only a hundred and eighty-two domestic applicants for those positions. These are jobs that Americans are simply don’t want to do sitting where you’re at today, what are some biggest gaps that you’ve seen that you wish more people are building? And not AI for luxury or AI’s for abundance, but it’s really AI for resiliency. Why combinator gets a million dollars in tokens from Oken AI, we get access to a tractor. Danny, welcome to the show. Thank you, Michelle. This is super fun. Thanks for coming out to Salinas. Yeah, I know this is a great day to be out here. So we’re out here, Salinas, 24 acres. 40 acres. 40 acres of you know, like different machines running on the field. So take me back to where this idea first started. Yeah, so Reservoir is a technical community for agriculture, and that’s kind of a new thing. And and so what inspired me is that I actually spent close to 20 years in Silicon Valley. How impactful technical communities were toward accelerating big discoveries. And you’re in San Francisco and there are technical communities kind of everywhere, whether it’s Y Combinator or around UC Berkeley, around Stanford. And I started to study basically how were technologies developed for the physical world where these technical communities may not exist, and we have significant technical opportunities in areas like agriculture or forestry or land management. But li

What is tactile sensing in robotics? Tactile sensing converts physical contact into data a robot can use. In GelSight's vision-based approach, a camera reads how a soft surface deforms and produces detailed information about contact geometry. What is holding robot manipulation back? In this conversation, Youssef Benmokhtar argues that the bottleneck is both hardware and data. The field has not converged on a standard sensing technology or shared model, which makes tactile data harder to combine at scale. In this episode, I speak with Youssef Benmokhtar, CEO of GelSight. Tactile is on the edge of innovation for robotic dexterity. It’s the sensory bridge between computer vision and physical AI. Youssef has extensive experience in imaging, optics, and scaling sensor businesses. He held leadership roles at semiconductor and photonics leaders like STMicro, OmniVision, and Magic Leap before taking the helm at GelSight in 2021. GelSight, headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, is a spinout from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). The company also partnered with Meta FAIR to open-source Digit 360, a fingertip-shaped tactile sensor in 2024. In March 2026, GelSight was awarded a Phase II SBIR contract with the US Air Force to develop a miniaturized, rugged “digital fingertip” tactile sensor for intelligent robotic grasping. As robotics move beyond locomotion to dexterity, high-resolution touch intelligence is increasingly critical for manipulation, maintenance, and hazardous industrial operations. GelSight describes itself as digitizing the sense of touch. We talked through: * The transition from vision to tactile intelligence: How digitized touch follows the same trajectory of visual optics and audio into trillion-dollar industries. * Building a data-rich platform: Transitioning GelSight from a standalone hardware sensor to an integrated platform offering software libraries, cloud data analytics, and modular hardware architectures. * Open source vs. proprietary software: The strategic rationale behind collaborating with Meta on the Digit sensor, seeding the academic research ecosystem, and standardizing tactile data for physical AI. * The bottleneck in humanoid dexterity: Why manipulation needs an “ImageNet for Touch,” how platforms like NVIDIA Isaac enable Sim-to-Real translation, and how fine tactile resolution unlocks true superhuman precision.Navigating deep tech hardware strategy: Managing custom form factors, avoiding hardware commoditization, and setting clear ethical boundaries for robotics in defense and industrial automation. Follow GelSight here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gelsight/ | Website: https://www.gelsight.com

In this episode of Core Matter, we covered how Europeans, Southeast Asians, and Americans behave differently when they come to Shenzhen, where demand is concentrated in the physical AI supply chain, and why a German robotics company moved R&D to Shenzhen. Joining me is Jasmine Bai, Vice General Manager at FAIR Plus, where she runs international development. FAIR Plus is a Shenzhen exhibition co-organized by the Shenzhen Robotics Association and Messe Stuttgart, built for robot developers. Its second edition in April 2026 had more than 400 exhibitors and 60,000 visitors, roughly 3,000 of them international, across 100 countries. Where demand is strongest in Physical AI Component suppliers took 70% of their exhibition floor. Full robot makers, 20-25%. It maps to the typical archetype of visitors for FAIR Plus: researcher-founders. A growing number of them also came for the brain side of the stack. Visitor behavior differs by region Europeans arrive having already concluded they need a hardware supply-chain partner in Shenzhen. Southeast Asian buyers come to source finished robots to resell into Malaysia and Thailand. American visitors, the largest international cohort, mostly came to observe. We also covered a German robotics company relocating R&D to Shenzhen, the humanoid makers that drew the most crowded sessions from attendees, and the coordination layer above deployed robot fleets that Siemens is positioning to own. Follow FAIR Plus here: https://fairplus.cn/en/about-fairplus/ You can also watch the show on Youtube: Every episode, I sit down with the founders, researchers, and operators building physical AI worldwide, tracing the full stack from components and supply chains to what actually deploys. See all published episodes here. Chapters00:00 - Intro 01:41 - The strategic focus on robotic research and industry partnerships 03:03 - Surprising trends: American visitors’ prominence in China 04:45 - Regional motivations: Europe, Southeast Asia, and the US 06:52 - Insights into American visitor behavior and industry development 09:33 - The platform’s role in supporting robot developers and tech exchanges 12:07 - Types of visitors: universities, startups, and corporate innovators 13:36 - Academic researchers and their role in commercial robotics 14:34 - Trends in localization: German companies establishing R&D in Shenzhen 17:15 - Future directions: humanoid robots and industry adoption 19:14 - Popular sessions on collaborative research and supply chain innovation 22:23 - The increasingly unavoidable need to collaborate with China 23:17 - Notable exhibitors shaping future industry trends 24:23 - The open and collaborative industry environment fostered by companies like Siemens FAIRPlus organiser Jasmine Bai on what American buyers actually come to Shenzhen for, and why component makers take roughly 70 percent of exhibitor count against 20 to 25 percent for whole-robot firms.majority of them will agree that they have to work with China it’s not a question anymore the next question is about how to cooperate with China what about the Americans like what do they come to FAIRPlus for? most of them just come and have a look components company take 70% 20 to 25 is whole robot 500 companies 60,000 visitors FAIRPlus is the largest physical AI exhibition in Shenzhen it covers the full stack hardware software and the supply chain behind it this year the most number of international attendees come from the United States Europeans and Southeast Asians came to buy hardware Americans came to talk Jasmine Bai runs the international side of FAIRPlus she sees who flies in and why we’ll find out what the world looks like from her seat Hi Jasmine, thank you so much for taking the time today yeah, thank you you run the international side of FAIRPlus the people who fly in the people who speak so can you walk me through how this job actually what you actually do and who are you trying to get into the building yeah, a lot of people will ask me becaus