DEX-PHD: A Dexterous Portable Handheld Device for Multimodal Data Collection

Overview & Synopsis

Existing manipulation data collection methods typically offer either accurate robot-state acquisition through kinematic-chain-based teleoperation or convenient, portable operation through vision-based approaches. We present DEX-PHD, a portable handheld device that combines these advantages for dexterous manipulation by integrating a dexterous robot hand, continuous per-finger control, and multimodal logging. The system records proprioceptive information, fingertip contact data, and wrist-camera video, while the operator directly controls the robot hand through joint-level mapping. Its untethered design enables data collection across diverse environments. We demonstrate DEX-PHD on contact-rich tasks requiring coordinated multi-finger manipulation and deploy the collected demonstrations through open-loop replay on a physical humanoid robot. The results show that open-loop replay preserves the main temporal patterns of finger motion and task-relevant contact. Therefore, DEX-PHD provides a practical platform for portable, multimodal dexterous manipulation data collection.