Tilburg Hand
A new low-cost, Open Source robot hand designed for research on dexterous manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning.
Purchase Form
Send us an email or fill-in the Contact Request form below
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Purchase a Tilburg Hand
Send us a pre-order inquiry to discuss your needs and customizations, and to receive a final quote and invoice. On receipt of payment, we will carefully manufacture and assemble a Tilburg Hand for you.
Download the software
Download the software libraries, example code, and user-contributed demos from our GitHub.
Have fun with your research!
We encourage you to release your research code and trained neural networks so that other users of the Tilburg Hand can build on it. We are happy to host or link to your contributions at Tilburg-hand-contrib.
FAQ
We are happy to answer any remaining questions by email.How much is the Tilburg Hand?
The Tilburg Hand is low-cost by design, to allow more research group to contribute to the awesome field of DRL for Robotics.
Fully assembled and tested robot hands can be currently purchased for Euro 5.000 (incl. EU VAT tax). For sales outside of the EU, we work together with the customers to ensure a smooth process.
International sales are without EU VAT (Euro 4.132), but the buyer is responsible for local taxes and eventual import duties.
A pair of Left + Right robot hands can be purchased at a discount (Euro 9.500 incl EU VAT, or Euro 7851 excl).
Accompanying software (libraries, tools, and demos) and documentation are/will be made available as Open Source on GitHub.
A selected number of early customers may be entitled to a 10% discount if they agree to provide feedback on their use and on the hardware and software, so that we can keep improving the Tilburg Hand.
What is the difference between the Tilburg Hand and the Shadow Hand or the Allegro Hand?
Both the Allegro Hand and the Shadow Hand are fantastic robot hands, and if you have the budget you should probably buy one of those instead!
However, their high cost is a barrier to most research groups and companies wishing to work on dexterous robots.
The Tilburg Hand compromises some features to achieve a lower production cost. For example, the Tilburg Hand is controlled through a simple USB interface rather than a CAN bus. Notably however, this is sufficient when using Deep Reinforcement Learning instead of traditional robotics methods, which is the primary intended use of the platform.
What software is included with the Tilburg Hand?
The Tilburg Hand software will be made available as Open Source on GitHub.
The software includes a Python library (C++ to come later) to control the robot hand, along with ready-to-run demonstrations (e.g., control via camera-based hand pose tracking).
Is the Tilburg Hand fully Open Source?
The Tilburg Hand is a fully Open Source project. BOM, electronics, and CAD files for all parts will be released around December 2022.
While it will be possible to manufacture all parts and assemble the robot hand from the Open Source plans, there remain complexities due to collection of parts from different suppliers and in assemblying the hand. We originally decided to build and sell the Tilburg Hand especially to overcome such difficulties, and thus allow as many interested parties as possible to gain access to the platform.
A more immediate advantage of the Open Source nature of the project is in the ease of modification of the hand to individual needs (e.g., wrist interface to different robot arms, integration with touch sensors, customization of the shape of the fingertips, etc...).
Is the Tilburg Hand compatible with X?
The Tilburg Hand has been designed for ease of adaptation to everybody's needs. In Purchase Interest form, we ask you to describe your setup, and in particular your planned integration with robot arms and touch sensors, so that we can discuss the planned integration in detail.
Why was the Tilburg Hand developed?
The high cost of robot platforms is a major barrier that limits research in the field. With the coming revolution of end-to-end (deep) learning methods for robotics, more and more researchers from outside strictly robotics backgrounds are starting to show interest in the field. Such research groups often do not already have robot platform to use for their research. The Tilburg Hand was designed to be truly low cost, to help as many interested people as possible to enter this exciting field!
Why Tilburg Robotics?
The name is our little tribute to the pretty city of Tilburg, in the Netherlands, and to Tilburg University.
We have made a small page with some interesting facts and photos about the city. Click here to visit it. 🙂
Our logo is cute, isn't it?
As many people have shown interest in our logo, we are currently considering selling merchandise with this cute robot to help fund our research. 🙂
Please let us know if you may be interested in this.
TECH SPECS
The Tilburg Hand achieves a true low cost by a combination of commercially available smart servos and industrial 3D printing (Multi Jet Fusion).