Sarcomere Dynamics Inc.
Alberta start-up making the ARTUS Lite, a 1.1 kg five-finger robotic hand with 16 active DoF and 20 joints that mounts on standard cobot arms.
Sarcomere Dynamics Inc. is a Canadian robotics company that designs and builds human-sized dexterous robotic hands. It was incorporated in February 2021 after joining the e@UBC venture programme at the University of British Columbia, where co-founder and CTO Avtar Mandaher developed the company's original actuator technology while completing his engineering degree. The other co-founders are CEO Harpal Mandaher, a 32-year Canadian Armed Forces veteran, and Nancy Mandaher, a retired nurse and early investor who is listed as CFO in earlier profiles and COO in later ones. The company began in Abbotsford, British Columbia, and is now based in St. Albert, Alberta, near Edmonton.
The founders first set out to build an affordable prosthetic hand. An early demonstrator weighed about 300 grams and had 11 degrees of freedom, but proved too complex for patients to control, and the company pivoted to robotic end-effectors for industry while continuing prosthetics research with a stated goal of a prosthetic hand under USD 8,000.
ARTUS Lite. The flagship product is the ARTUS Lite, a five-digit robotic hand (four fingers and a thumb) modelled on the size of an adult male hand. According to the company's 2024 specification sheet it has 20 articulated joints, four per finger, with 16 independently actuated degrees of freedom and four under-actuated ones. It weighs 1.1 kg, carries a maximum payload of 5 kg (10 to 15 kg on request), exerts about 1.5 kg of force at the fingertips and opens and closes at 0.6 Hz. It is built from carbon fibre, aluminium and silicone, runs on a 12 V DC, 120 W supply, senses finger joint position and applied force internally, and connects over CAN bus, serial or Wi-Fi. It uses an ISO 9409-1-50-4-M6 flange so it can be fitted to most collaborative and industrial robot arms with a 5 kg payload class. The ARTUS Lite won first place in the robotics category of the 16th Innovation World Cup at Hannover Messe and is shipping to customers in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and China, mainly through system integrators and manufacturers. The company targeted output of 100 hands a month by the end of 2025.
Next-generation ARTUS and tactile skin. Sarcomere is developing an industrial ARTUS hand with aircraft-grade aluminium structural parts, weighing 1.1 to 1.4 kg and rated for payloads up to 20 kg and millions of industrial cycles, alongside a lighter 3D-printed version. With German sensor firm Nanosen it is adding an artificial skin that covers the whole hand surface, detecting grip force and proximity on the palm and back of the hand, not only at the fingertips.
Haptic teleoperation. The company has also built a haptic glove that maps an operator's hand motion one-to-one onto the robot hand and returns contact information through small inflating bubbles. It has demonstrated the system for nuclear decommissioning and radioactive-waste handling at the World Nuclear Exhibition, and part of the work came from a Canadian Department of National Defence challenge. Target uses include bomb disposal, chemical handling and deep-sea operations, as well as industrial assembly, sorting, pick-and-place, food packing and electronics handling.
In 2026 Sarcomere exhibited at Innovex and Computex in Taipei, seeking Taiwanese contract manufacturers for assembly, supply partners for circuit boards, edge computers and gearboxes, and robot-arm and machine-vision partners for plug-and-play embodied-AI systems.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
ARTUS Lite robotic hand
Human-sized five-finger robotic hand with 16 active and 4 under-actuated DoF, joint position/force sensing and ISO flange for standard robot arms.
ARTUS industrial hand with full-surface tactile skin
Next-generation aluminium ARTUS hand rated for heavier payloads, with Nanosen artificial skin sensing force and proximity across the whole hand.
Haptic teleoperation glove
Operator glove that maps hand motion one-to-one onto the ARTUS hand and feeds back contact via inflating bubbles, shown for nuclear decommissioning.
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Contact Sarcomere Dynamics Inc.
WEBSITE
https://sarcomeredynamics.comPHONE
+1 825-522-0124HEADQUARTERS
Canada
Company Facts
Founded
2021
Primary Role
Component Supplier
Company Size
-
Primary Region
North America
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
-
Funding Total
-
Keywords
- Sarcomere Dynamics Inc.
- Sarcomere
- ARTUS Lite
- five-finger robotic hand
- 16 DoF hand
- Nanosen artificial skin
- haptic teleoperation glove
- nuclear decommissioning
- prosthetic hand research
- cobot end-effector
- Component Supplier
- Manufacturer
- End-effector & Grasping
- Human-Machine Interaction
- Manufacturing
- Special / Extreme Environments
- Pick and Place
- Assembly
- Nuclear
- Hazmat
