WHED: A Wearable Hand Exoskeleton for Natural, High-Quality Demonstration Collection

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17908v2
• Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:35:31 GMT
• Title: WHED: A Wearable Hand Exoskeleton for Natural, High-Quality Demonstration Collection
• Abstract summary: We present WHED, a wearable hand-exoskeleton system designed for in-the-wild demonstration capture.<n>We show feasibility on representative grasping and manipulation sequences spanning precision pinch and full-hand enclosure grasps.
• Score: 7.615440875928701
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Scalable learning of dexterous manipulation remains bottlenecked by the difficulty of collecting natural, high-fidelity human demonstrations of multi-finger hands due to occlusion, complex hand kinematics, and contact-rich interactions. We present WHED, a wearable hand-exoskeleton system designed for in-the-wild demonstration capture, guided by two principles: wearability-first operation for extended use and a pose-tolerant, free-to-move thumb coupling that preserves natural thumb behaviors while maintaining a consistent mapping to the target robot thumb degrees of freedom. WHED integrates a linkage-driven finger interface with passive fit accommodation, a modified passive hand with robust proprioceptive sensing, and an onboard sensing/power module. We also provide an end-to-end data pipeline that synchronizes joint encoders, AR-based end-effector pose, and wrist-mounted visual observations, and supports post-processing for time alignment and replay. We demonstrate feasibility on representative grasping and manipulation sequences spanning precision pinch and full-hand enclosure grasps, and show qualitative consistency between collected demonstrations and replayed executions.

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