The MOTIF Hand: A Robotic Hand for Multimodal Observations with Thermal, Inertial, and Force Sensors

TL;DR

The MOTIF hand is a low-cost, multimodal robotic hand equipped with thermal, inertial, and force sensors, enabling advanced manipulation tasks like temperature-aware grasping and mass differentiation beyond vision-only methods.

Contribution

We introduce the MOTIF hand, a novel multimodal robotic hand integrating thermal, inertial, and force sensors, enhancing manipulation capabilities with rich onboard sensing.

Findings

Thermal sensing improves 3D reconstruction for temperature-aware grasping.

The hand can distinguish objects with identical appearance but different masses.

Experiments validate multimodal sensing benefits in manipulation tasks.

Abstract

Advancing dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered robotic hands requires rich sensory capabilities, while existing designs lack onboard thermal and torque sensing. In this work, we propose the MOTIF hand, a novel multimodal and versatile robotic hand that extends the LEAP hand by integrating: (i) dense tactile information across the fingers, (ii) a depth sensor, (iii) a thermal camera, (iv), IMU sensors, and (v) a visual sensor. The MOTIF hand is designed to be relatively low-cost (under 4000 USD) and easily reproducible. We validate our hand design through experiments that leverage its multimodal sensing for two representative tasks. First, we integrate thermal sensing into 3D reconstruction to guide temperature-aware, safe grasping. Second, we show how our hand can distinguish objects with identical appearance but different masses - a capability beyond methods that use vision only.