Grasping Force Planning and Control for Tendon-driven Anthropomorphic Prosthetic Hands

Abstract

A force planning and control method is proposed for a tendon-driven anthropomorphic prosthetic hand. It is necessary to consider grasping stability for the anthropomorphic prosthetic hand with multi degrees of freedom which aims to mimic human hands with dexterity and stability. The excellent grasping performance of the anthropomorphic prosthetic hand mainly depends on the accurate computation of the space position of finger tips and an appropriate grasping force planning strategy. After the dynamics model of the tendon-driven anthropomorphic prosthetic hand is built, the space positions of the finger tips are calculated in real time by solving the dynamic equations based on the Newton iteration algorithm with sufficient accuracy. Then, the balance of internal grasping force on the thumb is adopted instead of force closure of the grasped objects to plan the grasping forces of other fingers based on the method of the linear constraint gradient flow in real time. Finally, a fuzzy logic controller is used to control the grasping force of the prosthetic hand. The proposed force planning and control method is implemented on the tendon-driven anthropomorphic prosthetic hand and the experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.