We are releasing HX Friends, an open-source collection of robotic hand and gripper reference designs built on DYNAMIXEL.
Many university labs and companies already use DYNAMIXEL actuators to build and share open-source robotic hands such as Leap Hand, Orca Hand, MIDAS Hand, and OpenHand. While developing our 20-DOF HX5-D20 hand, our team saw firsthand how widely the required degrees of freedom and finger configurations vary depending on the research topic or workspace. Sometimes a human-like five-finger hand is needed, while in many other cases a three-finger or four-finger hand with fewer parts and simpler maintenance, or a sturdy 1-DOF gripper, is much more practical.
Using DYNAMIXEL actuators and modular joint structures, we organized HX Friends as a five-model reference lineup that lets you compare and modify configurations step by step, from a single finger to a gripper and multi-finger hands:
- HX1-D03 (Finger): A 3-DOF (all-pitch) single finger module built with three XM335 actuators and one fingertip tactile sensor. It serves as a basic building block for testing joint stacking, grasping, and wave motions before scaling up to a full hand.
- HX2-D01 (Gripper): A 1-DOF two-finger gripper using one XM430 actuator, showing how a different DYNAMIXEL series can be used to build a simple and sturdy grasping structure.
- HX3-D11 (Hand): An 11-DOF three-finger hand with eleven XM335 actuators and three tactile sensors, designed to enable compact multi-finger control while reducing the number of parts to manage.
- HX4-D12 (Hand): A 12-DOF four-finger hand equipped with twelve XM335 actuators and four tactile sensors, balancing manipulability and mechanical simplicity. This model is planned for use on AI Sapiens.
- HX5-D20 (Hand): A 20-DOF five-finger anthropomorphic hand featuring twenty XM335 actuators and five tactile sensors to handle a wide workspace and fine multi-finger coordination. It works well as an optional hand for AI Worker.
In the release video, you can see preset motions and grasping tests across all five models, along with VR teleoperation demos for HX3-D11, HX4-D12, and HX5-D20. We also added a web-based 3D viewer to the documentation page so you can inspect joint coordinate frames and move individual joints with sliders directly in your browser.
HX Friends is a starting point for designing a hand tailored to your specific robot and problem. We recommend freely modifying the degrees of freedom and finger layouts based on these reference structures. All hardware and software are released as open source, and we look forward to seeing a wider variety of robotic hands come into the world.
Video: https://youtu.be/kZfS2w343Gc
Code: GitHub - ROBOTIS-GIT/robotis_hand: ROS Packages for Robotis Hand · GitHub
Docs: HX Friends | ROBOTIS Docs
Community: ROBOTIS | Actuator for Physical AI