ISyHand: A Dexterous Multi-finger Robot Hand with an Articulated Palm

Abstract: The rapid increase in the development of humanoid robots and customized manufacturing solutions has brought dexterous manipulation to the forefront of modern robotics. Over the past decade, several expensive dexterous hands have come to market, but advances in hardware design, particularly in servo motors and 3D printing, have recently facilitated an explosion of cheaper open-source hands. Most hands are anthropomorphic to allow use of standard human tools, and attempts to increase dexterity often sacrifice anthropomorphism. We introduce the open-source ISyHand (pronounced easy-hand), a highly dexterous, low-cost, easy-to-manufacture, on-joint servo-driven robot hand. Our hand uses off-the-shelf Dynamixel motors, fasteners, and 3D-printed parts, can be assembled within four hours, and has a total material cost of about 1,300 USD. The ISyHands's unique articulated-palm design increases overall dexterity with only a modest sacrifice in anthropomorphism. To demonstrate the utility of the articulated palm, we use reinforcement learning in simulation to train the hand to perform a classical in-hand manipulation task: cube reorientation. Our novel, systematic experiments show that the simulated ISyHand outperforms the two most comparable hands in early training phases, that all three perform similarly well after policy convergence, and that the ISyHand significantly outperforms a fixed-palm version of its own design. Additionally, we deploy a policy trained on cube reorientation on the real hand, demonstrating its ability to perform real-world dexterous manipulation.