AGILINK Robot Hand Takes Up Suzhou Embroidery as Shipments Pass 15,000

Chinese robotics company AGILINK said its OmniHand 3 Ultra dexterous robot hand has been taught foundational Suzhou embroidery techniques by master craftswoman Fu Xianghong, according to a company announcement issued September 30, 2026. The announcement also said the company has shipped more than 15,000 dexterous hands to date.

The Suzhou Embroidery Demonstration

Fu, described in the announcement as a Suzhou embroidery inheritor, taught the robotic hand to separate silk threads, thread a needle, stretch fabric on an embroidery hoop, and stitch. Images distributed with the announcement show the OmniHand 3 Ultra stitching on a silk embroidery frame, and the company released a demonstration film of the work.

The announcement presents silk as one of the most delicate and deformable materials a robotic hand can work with, noting that a silk thread bends, slips, and changes shape under small shifts in contact. The company said each technique isolates a different manipulation problem: splitting silk calls for one finger to separate individual strands while the remaining fingers hold support and tension; twisting thread calls for opposing fingertips to stay in contact while the thread rotates; and threading a needle and stitching place further demands on positioning, force, and coordination.

“We’ll have another pair of hands for delicate work,” Fu said.

The Hand Behind the Demonstration

The OmniHand 3 Ultra combines 21 active degrees of freedom with a fully direct-drive architecture and tactile sensing across the fingertips, finger pads, and palm, according to the announcement. Vision-based tactile sensors at each fingertip detect changes in the contact surface, providing feedback as the hand handles thin, deformable materials.

“A single silk thread gives OmniHand 3 Ultra’s fingertip dexterity a visible measure,” said Qiao Tianjie, Vice President of AGIBOT and CEO of AGILINK. He said the demonstration also shows the potential for machines to take on more delicate work.

Published specifications for AGILINK’s flagship direct-drive model, the OmniHand Ultra-M, list 20 active degrees of freedom in a 630-gram, human-scale build measuring 189.5 by 88.5 by 40 millimeters, with a 3-kilogram stable grasping payload, an 8-kilogram lifting capacity, a typical opening and closing time of 0.3 seconds, and repetitive positioning accuracy of ±0.2 millimeters. The fingertip units use vision-based tactile sensing with texture recognition and three-dimensional distributed force measurement across a 0–30 newton range at 0.005-newton resolution, alongside 0.04-millimeter spatial resolution and 0.08-millimeter deformation-field accuracy. A three-dimensional tactile sensor in the palm carries 300 tactile pixels at 0.1-newton resolution.

The product page also lists 500,000 validated cycles, a surface temperature of 40 to 45 degrees Celsius under continuous load, CANFD and Ethernet communication, C++ and Python software development kits with full API coverage, native simulation assets for NVIDIA Isaac and MuJoCo, and reference nodes for ROS 2 teleoperation and joint-space control.

A tendon-driven sibling model, the OmniHand Ultra-T, is listed with 22 active degrees of freedom plus a three-degree-of-freedom wrist in a 500-gram hand and a full assembly weight of about 1.7 kilograms. The company lists a 0.3-second cycle time; force, position, velocity, and hybrid control modes; CANFD and Ethercat communication; and full-hand distributed three-dimensional tactile sensing at 0.01-newton resolution integrated with an in-palm camera.

Shipments, Medals, and Funding

AGILINK said the demonstration comes as it reaches a new stage of commercial scale. Spun out from AGIBOT in January 2026, the company said its shipments have passed 15,000 dexterous hands. It also said its OmniHand series competed across all eight dexterous-hand events at the World Humanoid Robot Games in August 2026, winning seven gold, four silver, and three bronze medals.

According to the announcement, AGILINK reached unicorn status five months after launch, backed by investors including Hillhouse Ventures and Mirae Asset, and its fourth funding round in June 2026 valued the company at more than US$1 billion. The company’s corporate timeline describes a June 2026 round at a post-money valuation exceeding US$1 billion and says AGILINK is scaling production toward 10,000 units per month.

The company said it sees dexterous manipulation of flexible and delicate materials as relevant to applications including cable handling, flexible-material assembly, and precision-component manipulation.

Company Timeline and Current Lineup

AGILINK’s timeline dates the effort to August 2023, when it was formed within AGIBOT to develop dexterous hands as core components for AGIBOT’s humanoid robotics platform. Its first products, the OmniHand and OmniHand Pro, launched in August 2025, which the timeline describes as the start of scaled production, and the company produced its 1,000th dexterous hand in December 2025. AGILINK was established as an independent company in January 2026, closing three funding rounds within weeks. In April 2026 it unveiled the OmniHand 3 Lite, OmniHand 3 Ultra-T, and OmniPicker 3 at the AGIBOT Partner Conference, and the OmniHand 3 Ultra-M debuted at ICRA in Vienna in June 2026.

The company says it secured the top dexterous-hand market share in China for the first quarter of 2026, while its homepage describes a No. 1 global dexterous-hand market-share ranking for the same quarter.

The current lineup spans five products: the direct-drive flagship OmniHand 3 Ultra-M, the tendon-drive flagship OmniHand 3 Ultra-T, the standard OmniHand 3, the compact OmniHand 3 Lite, and the OmniPicker 3 industrial gripper. The company targets industrial automation, data collection and AI training, and research and education, and its homepage fronts the “Hand Over Hand” campaign featuring the OmniHand 3 Ultra and the embroidery demonstration film.

AGILINK lists a core team of more than 60 members, scaling toward more than 100 by the fourth quarter of 2026, and operations across Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Singapore, with reach into Europe, the United States, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Japan.