Characterization, Analytical Planning, and Hybrid Force Control for the Inspire RH56DFX Hand
University of Colorado Boulder
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, immediately deployable, and open-source (upon publishing) interface for dexterous manipulation with the Inspire RH56DFX hand.
Big Screwdriver
Bottle
Can
Charger
Metal Cup
Mustard
Orange
Pen
Small Screwdriver
Sugar Box
Egg
Nut
Paper Cup
Raspberry
Strawberry
