Origami Robotics starts mass-producing S1 glove that records 20 finger joints and touch

Origami Robotics is betting that the robot-data race will be won on what each recorded hour contains, not on how many hours there are. In a blog post on Oct 21 titled "A million hours of what?", the San Francisco startup introduced S1, a skill-capture glove, and said it has started mass production.

What S1 measures

According to the company, S1 reads 20 finger joint angles directly with joint encoders, measures pressure at the fingertips and palm, and records video from a wrist-mounted global-shutter camera on the same timeline. Origami says the glove kept measuring when a hand worked inside a container out of the camera's view, while the vision pipelines it tested as baselines (MediaPipe Hand Landmarker, and WiLoR detection followed by HaMeR reconstruction) lost the hand or jumped between finger poses. Checked against OptiTrack motion capture, fingertip positions computed from the glove were accurate to the millimetre level for the index, middle and ring fingers in the glove's wrist frame. Wearers performed 30 demanding tasks, from fast Rubik's Cube solves to card shuffling, and a musician played violin, piano and percussion in it.

The design is tied to Origami's own robot hand: both share the same joint arrangement and tactile sensors, so each glove angle becomes a position target for the matching robot joint without a retargeting solver. An earlier rigid-shell glove, built seven months ago, was used in a couple of factories but fitted too few hands, which led to the current soft shell. A model to correct for contact differences between human and robot fingertips is still in development, and a second-generation hand is coming. No price, customer or shipping date was given.