HannesImitation: Grasping with the Hannes Prosthetic Hand via Imitation Learning

HannesImitation is an imitation learning-based approach that trains a single grasping policy across diverse objects and environments. The learned policy is deployed on the Hannes prosthetic hand, enabling control of wrist orientation and hand closure. The main contributions are

• HannesImitationPolicy: The novel application of Diffusion Policy to control a prosthetic hand equipped with and anthropomorphic wrist.
• HannesImitationDataset: A novel dataset for imitation learning with the Hannes prosthetic hand for grasping on unstructured scenarios.

🛠️ Installation

From the terminal, clone this repository with the following command. This repository uses Diffusion Policy as a submodule stored in hannes_imitation/external/diffusion_policy. This command also fetches the source code of all the submodules.

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/hsp-iit/HannesImitation.git
cd HannesImitation

If you did a normal clone:

git clone https://github.com/hsp-iit/HannesImitation.git
cd HannesImitation

Git does not clone the source code of the submodules in you local directory by default. If you also want to fetch the source code of the submodules, then do

git submodule update --init --recursive

The HannesImitation project builds on top of Diffusion Policy. To set up the environment and dependencies, please follow the installation instructions provided in the Diffusion Policy repository: https://github.com/real-stanford/diffusion_policy.

📚 Reading

Preprint available on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00491.

📂 Dataset

The HannesImitationDataset is available on HuggingFace at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/HSP-IIT/HannesImitation

🤝 Citation

@inproceedings{alessi2025hannesimitation,
  title={HannesImitation: Grasping with the Hannes Prosthetic Hand via Imitation Learning},
  author={Alessi, Carlo and Vasile, Federico and Ceola, Federico and Pasquale, Giulia and Boccardo, Nicol{`o} and Natale, Lorenzo},
  booktitle={IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  year={2025},
  pages={},
  organization={}
}

📬 Contacts

For any query feel free to contact Carlo Alessi.