Method
How these numbers are recorded
Every figure on this site comes from a public source, carries a date, and is graded by how much weight it can bear. Nothing here is bench-tested, and no vendor pays for placement.
What this site is
MechHand keeps a record of dexterous robot hands: what they specify, what they cost, who sells them, and where the public information stops. It exists because the same hand is routinely quoted at three different prices in the same year, and because the field that matters most to a buyer, the one that says what the number does not include, is usually absent.
The unit of publication is a record, not an article. A record has a specification table, a price table, a list of open fields, sources and a log. When something changes, the change is appended with a date. Old observations stay visible even when they are superseded.
Evidence tiers
Every price carries one letter. The letter describes the source, not our confidence in the vendor.
| Tier | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| A | A documented price on a live vendor or dealer page, naming the product. | LEAP Hand v1 kit at $2,066 |
| B | Two or more public sources disagree by more than 15%. Both are published. | RH56DFX at $5,600 and $20,599 |
| C | An estimate, a press figure, or a third-party snapshot without a vendor page behind it. | DexH13 at 98,000 RMB |
| D | No public price. Quote only, or no attributable source at all. | Shadow Hand |
A tier is not a quality judgment. A tier C figure can be accurate; it simply cannot be verified from the page it appears on. Where a vendor publishes a number, that number is used even when a competitor's is lower.
What this site is not
There is no laboratory here. No hand is purchased, mounted, cycled or torn down for these records. Force figures, service life and repeatability are reproduced from vendor documentation or a dealer page with the source named, and where the vendor states a test condition, that condition is repeated rather than summarized.
This matters for reading a "checked" date. It means the cited public page was re-checked on that date, not that the device was independently measured. When public sources conflict, the conflict is published instead of resolved. When a field has no source at all, it is left visibly empty and listed under open fields.
Dates
Each observation carries the date the page was checked, not the date it was published. Prices are appended, never overwritten. If a listing disappears, the row is marked superseded and stays in the table, because a vanished price is itself a fact about the channel.
Independence
No vendor has paid for a record, a ranking, a comparison or a link. There are no affiliate links on this site. If that changes, the change will be announced on this page before any link appears, and every affected page will carry a disclosure at the top.
Sourcing enquiries submitted through this site are forwarded to vendors when a buyer asks for that, and no commission is taken. That is stated on the enquiry page as well.
Corrections
Send a correction with a source and a date to mechhand@novaroy.com. If the source is public and attributable, the record is updated and the correction is noted in the record log. Corrections from vendors are welcome on the same terms: a claim with a page behind it, not an assertion.
Records are re-checked quarterly. The price panel states its observation date and next scheduled update, and it will not publish an index value until it has four consecutive quarters of a stable frame.