Joint housings, harmonic gearbox cases, encoder PCBs, end-effectors, and chassis panels for humanoid and collaborative robots. From a first-article joint to a 1,000-arm production cell — built to your torque, mass, and heat budget, not ours.
Robots that look elegant on stage tend to fail the same three ways in real cells. The teams that solve them ship hundreds of arms. The teams that don’t end up rebuilding their joint family at series-B.
A joint is a torque source minus the mass it carries minus the heat it dumps. Sizing one in isolation makes the next one in the chain a problem. We hold the geometry tight enough that the joint your simulator picked actually fits the kinematics you shipped.
Every gram added past the elbow ripples back through the kinematic chain. Pulling 40 g out of an end-effector houses turns a 2 kW shoulder joint into a 1.2 kW one. We design hardware that respects the cascade — proto in 3 days, refine in 7, freeze in 14.
Speed-and-separation safety lives or dies on the housing edge radius, the skin compliance, and the encoder redundancy. ISO 10218 and ISO/TS 15066 don’t care about the algorithm if the hardware lets you pinch a finger.
A humanoid bill of materials pulls from five processes. You shouldn’t need five suppliers — every part below ships from a single FabDigit cell against a single drawing pack.
Aluminum and steel joint housings, harmonic-drive gearbox cases, wrist plates, bearing-bore concentricity to ±0.005 mm. 3-axis, 4-axis trunnion, and full 5-axis available.
Learn more Chassis · covers · traysAluminum or steel torso panels, end-effector trays, cable-routing covers. Laser + form + weld + powder-coat in 7 – 14 days for first-article work.
Learn more Skins · grippers · housingsCapacitive-skin housings in PA12 or TPU, grippers in GF-PA66, cover plates in V-0 PC. Soft tooling for pilot runs, hardened steel for production.
Learn more Proto end-effectors · jigsFast iteration on grippers, cable-routing ducts, sensor brackets. SLS PA12 for production-near functional tests, SLM AlSi10Mg for replicating a CNC housing inside a week.
Learn more Encoder · motor-drive · safety MCUEncoder boards (4–12 layer), 48 V motor-drive controllers, redundant safety MCUs. ENIG / hard-gold finishes; conformal coating available for skin-adjacent boards.
Learn more Joint family · cell designEmbedded engineering on joint-family sizing, end-effector swap mechanics, and ISO 10218 / 15066 hardware compliance. We can co-locate for the duration of a qualification.
Learn moreNumbers below are the working ranges we deliver across recent humanoid and cobot programs. The coatings row carries our moat: surface treatments restricted on US/EU lines that our partner plants still run routinely.
A composite of the manipulators we currently ship — 6-DOF, ~25 kg payload, 1.4 m reach, 800 W per joint sustained. Hover any callout for the FabDigit hand-off behind that surface.
4-bolt machined base, ±0.01 mm flatness on the mating face so the kinematic zero matches your simulator. Hard anodise + Alodine touch-up.
Wall thickness driven by torque target; bore concentricity 0.01 mm TIR. Bearing surface fluid-honed inside the cell — no separate super-finish vendor.
Co-machined with the bearing carrier — saves three stack-ups of GD&T. We can use Nabtesco RV, HD CSG, or your in-house actuator.
Hybrid: machined aluminum collars at both ends, carbon-fibre wrap in the middle. Saves ~ 38 % wrist-distal mass vs all-aluminum.
Pitch + roll, polished steel output flange. Encoder PCB sits inside the housing — one connector exit, no external harness.
ISO 9409-1-50-4-M6 pattern, pneumatic + electrical pass-through. Swap heads in < 8 s without retraining the kinematic offsets.
Across the humanoid and cobot programs we ship, these six parts make up the majority of the spend. The spec ranges below are working envelopes, not commitments — your drawing tightens them further.
Cylindrical or hex housing that carries the bearing + motor + gearbox. Wall thickness, bolt-pattern, and bore concentricity all hand-tuned per joint.
Concentric machined case for a strain-wave gearbox. Co-machined bearing seats reduce the GD&T stack-up by a full datum chain.
4 – 8 layer absolute-position encoder boards. Magnetic or optical sensors, redundant where ISO/TS 15066 demands it.
Two-jaw, three-jaw, or vacuum grippers; quick-change mounting plate. Aluminum or PA12 SLS for proto, hardened steel for production wear surfaces.
Torso panels, end-cap covers, and capacitive-skin housings. Aluminum sheet for structural, GF-PA66 IM for skin housings.
Cat-3 / PL-d redundant safety controller. ISO 13849-1 architecture, conformal-coated for skin proximity, certified against your integrator’s acceptance test plan.
You design the joint. We machine the metalwork everything else bolts into — and integrate the gearbox, bearing, and actuator from your supplier list (or ours). Pick a joint to see the typical split.
Largest joint in the chain. Bore concentricity drives the rest of the bill of materials — we hold ±0.005 mm so the harmonic seats true on the first cycle.
Parts that come out of our CNC cell or PCB house. We hold the tolerance and ship the FAI.
Bought-in components we order, test, and assemble into the housing. Pick a partner or send us your AVL.
Line items we don’t touch — sized, supplied, or owned by your team. We make sure our parts mate to them, no surprises.
Industry-typical ranges from recent engagements. Specific commitments land in your quote — not in a marketing page.
5-axis CNC wins on the first 200 housings — lead time, geometry agility, no tooling at risk. As volume scales, near-net hybrid casting wins on unit cost but locks the wall.
Three real housing materials. 7075 wins on stiffness-to-weight; 6082 wins on cost + plating; AlSi10Mg (SLM) wins on lattice-fill mass reduction.
Freeze-to-arm-on-test-stand for a fresh 6-DOF cobot revision. Parallel where it can be, never serial when it doesn't have to be.
Most humanoid programs we onboard skip three of these phases on first pass. We make sure none of them get skipped silently — every phase has a deliverable you sign off on before we move to the next.
Drawings + STEP + simulator outputs land in our portal. An ME reviews each joint within 24 hours, flagging bore stack-ups, plating choices, and tolerance margins before quoting.
Quote out in 3 – 5 days. First joint on a machine within 5 days of PO; first parts in your hand within 8 – 14 days, full arm within 21.
Joints ship with a coupon CMM, encoder zero-test, and 4-hour run-on-stand at rated torque. Reports are pushed before parts.
Soft tooling, 50 – 100 pc pilot, real Cpk on the bearing-bore concentricity and harmonic-drive case TIR before any production commit.
200 – 1,000 joints/wk sustained inside a single named cell. Daily SPC, weekly OEE, monthly cost-walk on the next 12 months.
Field returns route into engineering. ECNs are graded, cost-impacted, and slotted into the next lot — no silent change orders, no surprise re-validations.
Dedicated 5-axis CNC cells for joint housing and harmonic- drive case work. Climate-controlled to ±1 °C so a 90 mm bore stays inside 0.005 mm TIR across the second pass. Coupon-tested each shift; SPC charts pushed to your QC team before the lot ships.
A composite of recent programs, anonymised to protect customer IP. Numbers are real ranges from the engagements they’re drawn from.
The customer was 40 g over budget at the wrist on a 16 kg bipedal platform. The previous vendor stack (Mongolia / Taiwan / Suzhou) ran on different drawing revs and couldn’t agree on what the encoder PCB cut-out should look like.
We onboarded the joint family in three days, redrew the encoder cut-out into the housing during the DFM call, and shipped the first arm in 14 days. Wrist mass landed 6 g under the original target — most of the saving came from co-machining the bearing carrier into the gearbox case.
The next 200 joints shipped on a 21-day rolling cadence. The customer’s next two arm SKUs are already on our DFM queue.
Environmental rulings since 2018 have closed dozens of US-side plating lines, especially the ones our customers’ joint housings need. Our domestic partners still run them daily. The short list below is what shows up most on cobot drawings.
Hex-chromium conversion on joint housings and base flanges where the bond to the chassis needs to be electrically conductive. Closed-loop bay, full neutralisation, audited each lot.
Sealed Type III on aluminum harmonic-drive cases up to 75 µm. Black-dye option keeps the joint visually quiet inside a cell. Runs alongside Type II for cosmetic edges.
Selective electroless nickel-boron on end-effector wear faces and gripper jaw surfaces. Drop-in for hardened steel where the geometry doesn’t allow a steel insert.
Self-lubricating anodise on joint bores that see infrequent service. Pairs with bearing-grease holdoff zones for 10× MTBF vs bare anodise.
Black e-coat over chassis panels and end-cap covers. Pinhole-free 25 µm uniform, ASTM B117 1,000 hr salt-spray, ESD-safe variants available.
M3 – M10 black-oxide steel fasteners and clamp pieces. Pairs with the anodise + powder-coat finishes so visible hardware disappears inside the housing line.
Yes — we ask for it. Joint mass is downstream of torque target, and we’d rather you spend 30 minutes on a call with our ME than eat a re-spec mid-build. Send the kinematic chain, the rated + peak torque per joint, and the platform mass. We send back the housing wall + bearing-bore + gearbox-case configuration we recommend, with the trade-offs called out.
We design housings, skins, and encoder redundancy against both standards. We don’t self-certify — the cell integrator owns certification. We provide the hardware documentation pack (drawings, material certs, plating traceability, run-on-stand reports) your safety auditor will actually open.
Yes. We run a dedicated PCBA cell for motion-control work — 4 to 12 layers, ENIG / hard-gold, X-ray on every BGA. The encoder board lives inside the joint housing and ships co-tested with the bearing assembly.
Joint cells in Shenzhen and Penang, a US onshore cell in Texas for ITAR / export-controlled programs. NDAs are signed before any CAD changes hands; you can audit the cell on 7 days notice.
Yes. Bipedal + quadruped + parallel-mechanism platforms welcome. We can also build co-machined paired joints (e.g. CRP-style shoulder + elbow pair) when the kinematics demand it.
We design the housings parametric to the three or four candidate gearboxes you’re still A/B testing — bolt-pattern, bore, and output-flange shape. A swap mid-program costs a re-cut, not a re-design.
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Send drawings, or send a sketch and a torque budget. Either way you’ll have an ME reviewing within 24 hours and a real quote on a real schedule shortly after.
