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Approaching Human Hand Dexterity Through Highly Biomimetic Design 113

6.6 CONCLUSION

We have designed and prototyped a highly biomimetic anthropomorphic
robotic hand that closely mimics the important biomechanics of the human
hand with artificial joints and ligaments. During this process, we first identified
two crucial constraints that have been limiting the development of anthropo-
morphic robotic hands: the lack of properly translated engineering knowledge
of the human hand and the restrictions caused by conventional mechanical
joints. And then we reinterpreted and detailed the ways to replicate important
biomechanical advantages of the human hand with the language and methods
that roboticists can easily understand. We experimentally demonstrated that
our proposed robotic hand design has good repeatability in finger motions
and can be teleoperated to grasp and manipulate a wide selection of daily
objects within the fingertip workspaces under current design.
In future work, we are planning to incorporate biomimetic wrist design
and already-developed fingertip sensors [24] in our robotic hand so that we
can further improve its telemanipulation performance. In addition, due to
the inherent similarity between our robotic hand and its human counterpart,
we are going to collaborate with researchers from biology and tissue engi-
neering to further explore its potential to serve as a bio-fabricated device/
scaffold in the emerging fields of neuroprosthetics and limb regeneration.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by the US National Science Foundation. The author would like to
thank Dr. Emanuel Todorov for his generous support and valuable discussions, thank Dr.
Christopher Allan at the HarborView Medical Center for his help in guiding the cadaver
hand dissection, and thank Svetoslav Kolev for his help in setting up the Vicon experiments.

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