Characterization, Analytical Planning, and Hybrid Force Control for the Inspire RH56DFX Hand

TL;DR

This paper enhances the Inspire RH56DFX robotic hand with hardware calibration, a validated simulation model, and a hybrid control system, significantly improving its dexterous manipulation capabilities and reliability for research applications.

Contribution

It introduces hardware characterization, a sim2real validated model, and a hybrid control approach, transforming the hand into a more effective research tool for dexterous manipulation.

Findings

65% success in peg-in-hole insertion

87% success across diverse objects

Outperforms baseline methods

Abstract

Commercially accessible dexterous robot hands are increasingly prevalent, but many remain difficult to use as scientific instruments. For example, the Inspire RH56DFX hand exposes only uncalibrated proprioceptive information and shows unreliable contact behavior at high speed (up to 1618% force limit overshoot). Furthermore, its underactuated, coupled finger linkages make antipodal grasps non-trivial. We contribute three improvements to the Inspire RH56DFX to transform it from a black-box device to a research tool: (1) hardware characterization (force calibration, latency, and overshoot), (2) a sim2real validated MuJoCo model for analytical width-to-grasp planning, and (3) a hybrid, closed-loop speed-force grasp controller. We validate these components on peg-in-hole insertion, achieving 65% success and outperforming a wrist-force-only baseline of 10% and on 300 grasps across 15 physically diverse objects, achieving 87% success and outperforming plan-free grasps and learned grasps. Our approach is modular, designed for compatibility with external object detectors and vision-language models for width & force estimation and high-level planning, and provides an interpretable and immediately deployable interface for dexterous manipulation with the Inspire RH56DFX hand, open-sourced at this website https://correlllab.github.io/rh56dfx.html.