Guide
How to buy a dexterous robot hand
Nine checks, in order. The first one eliminates more purchases than the other eight combined.
Start by proving you need a hand instead of a gripper. Then pin down force specification, degrees of freedom, interface, spares and landed cost. Most failed purchases skip step one and discover the problem after the invoice.
1. Prove you need a hand instead of a gripper
A two-finger gripper costs $1,000 to $5,000, closes in 200 ms, survives being crashed, and does 80% of industrial pick-and-place. A five-finger hand costs five to twenty times more, needs more integration, and in most deployments does the same work more slowly.
The honest test is whether your task needs any of these: contact at more than two points, force distribution across a surface, in-hand reorientation, or a human hand shape for teleoperation and demonstration data. If none applies, buy the gripper. AGIBOT sells a $999 OmniPicker next to its five-finger hand for exactly this reason, and that is the single most useful pricing signal in the Chinese catalog.
2. Pick the number that actually constrains you
Two numbers get confused constantly. Degrees of freedom is how many independent motions the hand has. Joints is how many places it bends. A hand with six motors over 12 joints is a 6-DOF hand, not a 12-DOF hand, and the difference decides whether you can move one finger without moving its neighbours.
Write down the action space your software will control. If it is six-dimensional, a 16-DOF hand will not help. If it is 16-dimensional, a six-motor hand will silently collapse it. The counting guide goes through the conventions.
3. Demand a force specification with a test condition
"50 kg load" and "20 N fingertip" are not the same kind of number. One may be a static structural rating, the other a measured pinch force. Without a test condition, neither is comparable with anything.
Ask three questions of every vendor: what is the maximum fingertip force in newtons, at what joint angle, measured how. A vendor who cannot answer is telling you something useful. A vendor who answers with a load in kilograms is telling you something more useful.
4. Decide whether you need force sensing or contact location
Joint torque sensing tells you how hard the hand is pushing. Tactile arrays tell you where. Most grasping works with the first; insertion, slip detection and surface classification need the second. The price difference is large: compare a $13,000 Allegro with per-joint torque sensing against a 98,000 RMB DexH13 with 1,140 tactile units.
5. Check the interface before the specification
CAN, CAN FD, RS-485, EtherCAT, USB. Your controller already speaks one of them, and a converter adds latency and a failure mode. Then check the platform restriction: at least one dealer states the Unitree Dex5 hands work only with the G1 EDU (U1) and above. That single line can eliminate a hand from your shortlist regardless of its specs.
6. Price the landed cost, not the list price
A list price is the first of six numbers. Freight, import charges, brokerage, warranty reserve and integration time are the other five, and for a $5,000 hand they can add 30% or more. The landed-cost guide has a worked example and the fields to collect.
7. Ask what a replacement finger costs
Fingers break. Tendons stretch. A hand with no spare parts channel is a hand with a service life measured in months. Ask for the price and lead time of one finger assembly, one motor, and one cable harness. If the vendor cannot quote them separately, ask what happens when one fails inside the warranty period.
8. Treat service life as a cost line
A 2026 industry estimate puts hand replacement or repair at roughly every three months at 10,000–20,000 RMB per event, which for a 50-robot fleet runs into the tens of millions of RMB a year. Even if that estimate is off by half, it changes the arithmetic: a cheap hand that fails quarterly is more expensive than a mid-priced hand that lasts two years.
9. Buy one before you buy twenty
Run the hand on your actual task for four weeks. Measure cycle time, failure rate and how often a human has to intervene. Vendors will lend or rent evaluation units, and the ones who will not are telling you their return rate. This is also when you discover that the SDK documentation does not match the firmware.
If you cannot state the force you need, the interface you have, and the cost of a replacement finger, you are not ready to issue a purchase order. You are ready to issue questions. The RFQ template asks all three.
Questions
How much should a dexterous hand cost?
Published prices run from $2,066 for an open-source kit to about $110,000 for a configured research platform, with the dense middle between $5,000 and $27,000. Budget the landed cost, not the list price.
Do I need five fingers?
Only if the task or the data requires a human hand shape. Four fingers with an opposed thumb covers most grasps.
What is the most common purchasing mistake?
Buying a hand when a gripper would do, and buying on degrees of freedom without checking the interface.