Page 203 - Handbook of Biomechatronics

200 Georgios A. Bertos and Evangelos G. Papadopoulos

in detail along with available clinical results (Ohnishi et al., 2007). A recent
development in prosthetic hand design employs electroneurographic signals,
requiring an interface directly with the peripheral nervous system or the cen-
tral nervous system to control a prosthetic hand (Cloutier and Yang, 2013).
The current state of the upper-limb prosthetic market, with insights on
the accompanying technologies and techniques is presented, along with
prominent research solutions (Vujaklija et al., 2016). Moving away from
upper-limb cosmetic prostheses, active elbow joints are available today,
offering advanced control systems and multiple sensor integration and
multijoint articulation. Novel surgical techniques in combination with
modern, sophisticated hardware are enabling restoration of dexterous
upper-limb functionality.
On the application front, biomechatronic hands provide examples of
applied controllers. One of the first robotic hands was the Utah/MIT hand,
a tendon operated multi-DoF dexterous robotic hand ( Jacobsen et al., 1982,
1984)(Fig. 14). In this hand, a force PD controller was implemented at
bandwidth of 50Hz ( Johnston et al., 1996). A biomechatronic optimized
design of an anthropomorphic artificial hand for prosthetics and humanoid
has been developed (Zollo et al., 2007). Its control system is developed in
parallel to its mechanical design and is based on PD controllers with addi-
tional terms for compensating its elastic compliance.

Fig. 14 Utah/MIT hand. (Courtesy of the Computer History Museum.)