Anatomically correct testbed hand control: Muscle and joint control strategies

— Human hands are capable of many dexterous grasping and manipulation tasks. To understand human levels of dexterity and to achieve it with robotic hands, we constructed an anatomically correct testbed (ACT) hand which allows for the investigation of the biomechanical features and neural control strategies of the human hand. This paper focuses on developing control strategies for the index finger motion of the ACT Hand. A direct muscle position control and a forceoptimized joint control are implemented as building blocks and tools for comparisons with future biological control approaches. We show how Gaussian process regression techniques can be used to determine the relationships between the muscle and joint motions in both controllers. Our experiments demonstrate that the direct muscle position controller allows for accurate and fast position tracking, while the force-optimized joint controller allows for exploitation of actuation redundancy in the finger critical for this redund...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Ashish Deshpande, Jonathan Ko, Dieter Fox, Yoky Matsuoka
• Keywords: Act Hand, Control Strategies, Direct Muscle Position, ICRA 2009, Robotics