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

Benjamin A. Richardson^∗,1, Felix Grüninger^∗,2, Lukas Mack^∗,3, Joerg Stueckler³, Katherine J. Kuchenbecker¹

^* These authors contributed equally.
¹ Haptic Intelligence Department, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany
² Robotics ZWE, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart and Tübingen, Germany
³ Intelligent Perception in Technical Systems Group, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany

Contact: richardson@is.mpg.de · grueninger@is.mpg.de · lukas.mack@uni-a.de · joerg.stueckler@is.mpg.de · kjk@is.mpg.de

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 ISyHand’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.

Version Information

This website documents ISyHand v6, the current and most versatile version of the hand. An older version, ISyHand v2, is described in Mack et al. (ICRA 2025). While similar in structure and handling, v2 and v6 differ in key ways and are not interchangeable. Both v2 and v6 URDFs are available on the Download page.

References

ISyHand v6 [Richardson et al. (Humanoids 2025)]

@inproceedings{Richardson25-HR-ISyHand,
  author = {Richardson, Benjamin A. and Gr{\"u}ninger, Felix and Mack, Lukas and Stueckler, Joerg and Kuchenbecker, Katherine J.},
  title = {ISyHand: A Dexterous Multi-finger Robot Hand with an Articulated Palm},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids)},
  address = {Seoul, Korea},
  month = sep,
  year = {2025},
}

ISyHand v2 [Mack et al. (ICRA 2025)]

@inproceedings{Mack25-ICRA-Estimation,
  author = {Mack, Lukas and Gr{\"u}ninger, Felix and Richardson, Benjamin A. and Lendway, Regine and Kuchenbecker, Katherine J. and Stueckler, Joerg},
  title = {Visuo-Tactile Object Pose Estimation for a Multi-Finger Robot Hand with Low-Resolution In-Hand Tactile Sensing},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  address = {Atlanta, USA},
  month = may,
  year = {2025},
}

Additional publications

MinSound [Andrussow et al. (Humanoids 2025)]

@inproceedings{Andrussow25-HR-Minsound,
  author={Andrussow, Iris and Solano, Jans and Richardson, Benjamin A. and Martius, Georg and Kuchenbecker, Katherine J.},
  title={Adding Internal Audio Sensing to Internal Vision Enables Human-Like In-Hand Fabric Recognition with Soft Robotic Fingertips}, 
  booktitle={2025 IEEE-RAS 24th International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids)}, 
  address = {Seoul, Korea}, 
  month = sep,
  year={2025},
}