383 Grams, 50N, and ROS 2: Revo2 Bionic Hand

ByGeoff Dyers
A close-up of a humanoid robot hand in a robotics lab

BrainCo has launched its revo2 bionic hand for humanoid robotics, positioning it as a developer-ready end effector rather than just a prosthetics spinoff.

In BrainCo’s official documentation, the company says the hand weighs 383 grams, has 11 degrees of freedom with six active joints, delivers 50 newtons of active gripping force and supports RS485, CAN FD and EtherCAT, alongside SDK support for Linux, Windows, macOS and ROS.

The company is best known for prosthetics, and BrainCo says Revo 2 “builds upon the mature technological iteration and evolution of our prosthetic hands and the first-generation Revo 1 dexterous hand”. That lineage matters because this launch is really a category move: take a hand built out of prosthetics know-how and sell it into humanoids, lab robots and data-collection rigs.

BrainCo’s developer pitch is unusually explicit. Its ROS 2 materials say the stack is built on ROS 2 Humble and includes hardware control, Gazebo simulation and MoveIt motion planning, with support for both single-hand and dual-hand setups.

The hardware comes in three variants, BASIC, PRO and TOUCH. BrainCo says the TOUCH model adds multimodal tactile sensing, while ecosystem examples show the hand paired with robotic arms for jobs such as using a handheld scanner and grasping fruit with tactile feedback.

If you’re wondering what makes this more than a spec sheet, it is the integration story. BrainCo publishes adaptation guidance for Unitree’s G1 and offers downloadable SDK and URDF materials, which is the sort of plumbing developers need if they want a hand to show up in simulation before it ever touches real hardware.

The revo2 bionic hand’s headline numbers are still mostly self-reported. BrainCo says it is 160 millimetres long, can handle a maximum payload of 20 kilograms and communicates at up to 1 kilohertz, but the sources reviewed did not include independent testing from major English-language outlets or third-party benchmarks validating those performance claims.

Some of the numbers also need careful reading. Analysts commenting in robotics forums noted that repeatability is not the same thing as absolute precision, and that grip force on its own can be a slippery metric for a multi-jointed hand because where the force is applied matters. BrainCo’s own canonical docs list 50 N of active gripping force, but do not provide the fuller test context you would want for apples-to-apples comparison across hands.

Launch timing is slightly messy too. A PR Newswire release says BrainCo launched the revo2 bionic hand for humanoid robotics in September 2025, while a BrainCo news page surfaced with a malformed later date in search results. The cleanest public peg is the PR Newswire announcement and the current live documentation set.

The next public milestone is likely to show up in BrainCo’s ecosystem pages rather than in a journal paper: the company is already publishing ROS 2 packages, arm-integration examples and Unitree adaptation guidance, which makes broader robot-platform support the next obvious fact to watch.

Key Takeaways

  • BrainCo has launched Revo 2 as a humanoid-robotics hand, not only as a product derived from prosthetics.
  • BrainCo says the hand weighs 383 grams, has 11 degrees of freedom and delivers 50 newtons of active gripping force.
  • The company says Revo 2 supports RS485, CAN FD, EtherCAT, ROS and SDKs for Linux, Windows and macOS.
  • BrainCo’s ROS 2 stack includes hardware control, Gazebo simulation and MoveIt motion planning on ROS 2 Humble.
  • The main performance figures in this coverage come from BrainCo’s own documentation and vendor-distributed releases.

Further Reading