MIDAS Hand

Released in July 2026 by Dennis Hong's RoMeLa laboratory at UCLA together with ROBOTIS, the MIDAS Hand is an open-source research hand built around tactile sensing. It has four fingers, thumb, index, middle and ring, with 16 degrees of freedom of which 13 are actuated.

Thirteen Dynamixel XM335 servos sit inside the hand as low-impedance direct drives, with a small linkage moving each fingertip; the whole hand weighs about 700 g. Sensing is the headline feature: 283 three-axis taxels from PaXini's GEN3 modules cover the fingers, 127 on the thumb and 52 on each of the other three, and the actuators report their positions.

A Python API talks to the hand over the Dynamixel TTL bus and reads the tactile data; a MuJoCo model and a retargeting pipeline for teleoperation are included. The software is MIT-licensed, the bill of materials stays under USD 3,000 according to the paper, and assembly takes less than three hours.

ROBOTIS sells an actuator bundle without the printed parts; a complete hand is not sold, so pricing is on request. The same PaXini sensing appears in the commercial DexH13, while LEAP Hand is the closest low-cost open alternative.