Design of a cybernetic hand for perception and action

By Maria Chiara Carrozza, Giovanni Cappiello, Silvestro Micera, Benoni B. Edin, Lucia Beccai, Christian Cipriani. Biological cybernetics, 2006

362 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Strong motivation for developing new prosthetic hand devices is provided by the fact that low functionality and controllability—in addition to poor cosmetic appearance—are the most important reasons why amputees do not regularly use their prosthetic hands. This paper presents the design of the CyberHand, a cybernetic anthropomorphic hand intended to provide amputees with functional hand replacement. Its design was bio-inspired in terms of its modular architecture, its physical appearance, kinematics, sensorization, and actuation, and its multilevel control system. Its underactuated mechanisms allow separate control of each digit as well as thumb–finger opposition and, accordingly, can generate a multitude of grasps. Its sensory system was designed to provide proprioceptive information as well as to emulate fundamental functional properties of human tactile mechanoreceptors of specific importance for grasp-and-hold tasks. The CyberHand control system presumes just a few efferent and afferent channels and was divided in two main layers: a high-level control that interprets the user’s intention (grasp selection and required force level) and can provide pertinent sensory feedback and a low-level control responsible for actuating specific grasps and applying the desired total force by taking advantage of the intelligent mechanics. The grasps made available by the high-level controller include those fundamental for activities of daily living: cylindrical, spherical, tridigital (tripod), and lateral grasps. The modular and flexible design of the CyberHand makes it suitable for incremental development of sensorization, interfacing, and control strategies and, as such, it will be a useful tool not only for clinical research but also for addressing neuroscientific hypotheses regarding sensorimotor control.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b547a07cd0988aabe1e31c1da6c007c7747862ed

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Hand Posture Subspaces for Dexterous Robotic Grasping (2009, methodology): “Cipriani et al. (2006) applied this concept for prosthetic hands, assuming that the human operator can only select from a small set of pre-grasp shapes, relying on the passive mechanical adaptability of the CyberHand design (Carrozza et al. 2006) to complete the grasp.”
Myoelectric forearm prostheses: state of the art from a user-centered perspective. (2011, background): “A good example of a feature that greatly benefits from automation is the holding of a grasped object, which is implemented in several of the reviewed systems [52,54,59,73].”
On the Shared Control of an EMG-Controlled Prosthetic Hand: Analysis of User–Prosthesis Interaction (2008, methodology): “1) but also neural interfaces by simply changing the high-level controller [25]; the ultimate goal, in fact, is to connect a future version of the CyberHand via a neural interface implanted in peripheral nerves of amputees [22].”
Optoelectronically innervated soft prosthetic hand via stretchable optical waveguides (2016, background): “However, very few soft prosthetics have demonstrated equivalent sensing ability as motor-driven hand prosthetics, which often achieve proprioceptive sensing through motor motion encoders (8, 10–13) and realize force sensing through multiaxial force/torque load cells (10, 12, 13), which are bulky and”