Development of haptic prosthetic hand for realization of intuitive operation

This paper proposes a haptic prosthetic hand to realize intuitive operation for upper limb amputees. In the conventional myoelectric prostheses, it was hardly unable to control the grasping force precisely or to grasp an unevenly shaped object flexibly. In this paper, development of haptic prosthetic hand is achieved, which realizes intuitive operation by the following two functions: first, is the transmission of force sensation to the master interface attached to the healthy part of the body, second, is an adaptation to the shape of an object with flexibleness. The developed haptic prosthetic hand has multi degrees of freedom (DOFs), and the master interface has a limited number of DOF. Therefore, to control the multi-DOFs haptic prosthetic hand by a simple operation of the master interface, different DOF bilateral control is implemented as a control method. Haptics is used to realize intuitive operation, and the proposed variable compliance control is used for environmental adaptation. These functions enable to replace the force sensation of the missing hand, by any remaining healthy part of the body. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the function of the developed haptic prosthetic hand.