Progress towards the development of the SmartHand transradial prosthesis

This paper presents progress towards the development of an anthropomorphic 16 degree of freedom, 4 degree of mobility prosthetic hand for use by transradial amputees, named SmartHand. The hand is provided with 40 proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensors in the fingers and with a customized control architecture embedded in the palm. The compact size and weight will allow its use to a wide range of amputees in the near future. This paper shows the design and development of the mechanical structure, control architecture, communication protocol developed to deal with the hand, and briefly presents the sensor set embedded in the fingers. Joint sensors plots while a finger was closing at full speed demonstrate hand functionalities in terms of sensory, control and actuation systems. Finally a non-invasive user-prosthesis interface that could be directly connected to the SmartHand for shared control experiments is briefly presented.