Shadow Robot Company

A long-running British dexterous-hand company behind the Shadow Hand and the DEX-EE.

The Shadow Robot Company was founded in London in 1987, making it one of the oldest robotics companies still operating, now led by Rich Walker. Its best-known product is the Shadow Dexterous Hand: a tendon-driven, five-fingered hand roughly the size of a human hand with more than 20 degrees of freedom, long considered the standard hardware for dexterous-manipulation research. OpenAI's Dactyl project used it to train a policy in simulation and transfer it to the real hand, achieving in-hand object reorientation and single-handed Rubik's-cube solving. The company later partnered with Google DeepMind to develop the three-fingered DEX-EE hand, built for durability so it can withstand the long, intensive real-robot training that reinforcement learning requires while collecting large amounts of tactile and other sensor data.

ExampleOpenAI's 2019 demonstration of a Shadow Hand solving a Rubik's Cube one-handed is a classic example of sim-to-real transfer.

Also called

Shadow Robot

Related

Shadow Dexterous Hand · DEX-EE (Shadow Robot × Google DeepMind) · Dexterous Hand · Dactyl · Google DeepMind · Tendon-Driven Actuation

Sources

Shadow Robot unveils DEX-EE, developed with Google DeepMind
Shadow Robot Dexterous Hand & DEX-EE (Robots International)

As of

2026-09